JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT: ENGADIN

Hauser & Wirth St. Moritz is pleased to present ‘Engadin’, Jean-Michel Basquiat’s first solo exhibition dedicated to the paintings he created in and inspired by his visits to Switzerland.

December 14, 2024 – March 29, 2025

Born in Brooklyn, New York in 1960 and coming of age in the downtown, post-punk artistic scene of the late 1970s and early 1980s, Basquiat drew on the diversity and intensity of New York City within his multi-disciplinary practice. His expressive paintings combined bold text and imagery from his expansive references across art, film, history and music, as well as his experiences of everyday racism as a young Black man in the US.

After his first exhibition with Galerie Bruno Bischofberger in 1982, the same year Basquiat became one of the youngest ever artists to participate at Documenta in Kassel, the influences of the disparate cultural landscapes of New York City and Switzerland began to take shape in his work, incorporating the motifs of ski lifts, fir trees, mountains and German phrases into his expansive visual lexicon. ‘From then on, Jean-Michel Basquiat often visited me in Switzerland, where he particularly liked it. About half a dozen times in Zurich and exactly seven times in St. Moritz, four of them in the summer’, says Bischofberger.

Basquiat was captivated by the Engadin’s vast natural landscape, cultural history and the hospitality of the Bischofberger family. Perhaps what drew Basquiat most to this part of Switzerland was, as Dr. Dr. Dieter Buchhart writes, ‘the contrast between the pulsating life, the clubs, the street noise, and the breakneck speed of the metropolis New York and the ‘discovery of slowness’ in the unique, overwhelming landscape of the Engadin.’

Musing on what kept drawing the artist back to Switzerland, Buchhart writes, ‘For Basquiat, the Engadin meant work, inspiration, friendship, and rest and relaxation, all at the same time.’