The exhibition marked the first presentation in Switzerland of the work of the artist and thinker Jonathan Bragdon. Born in 1944 in Wilmington, Delaware (USA), Bragdon now lives in Amsterdam. Since the 1960s, the artist has explored the many layers of human perception of the world through graphite drawings, watercolours, paintings, as well as poems, texts and artistic interventions.
For more than five decades, Bragdon has engaged with the theme of the “landscape” in his work as a draftsman—both external and internal landscapes, the Landscapes and the Consciousness Portraits. He belongs to a generation of artists who have succeeded in using traditional genres and techniques to formulate new ways of understanding both our world and our relationship to it.
While his work appears at first to stand in the tradition of the American draftsman, Bragdon visualises the broad field of “being-in-the-world”. In recent years, these drawn “protocols” have been accompanied by digital “selfies” generated through the eye of the notebook computer. Whereas the pencil drawings—whether landscapes or portraits—are aesthetic transformations with the status of autonomous works, the photographs appear playful and witty, while at the same time posing the fundamental question: what, in fact, is “being”, and how can it be represented?
Conceived specifically for Kunstmuseum Appenzell in close collaboration with the artist, the exhibition brought together more than 120 drawings, paintings, poems and photographs, presenting Bragdon’s artistic position while reflecting the current paradigm shift in the ways nature, self, world and art are perceived. Across ten cabinets, visitors encountered, among other works, early matrix drawings, recent landscapes from Appenzell, Vaud, Berlin and Munich, self-portraits and spoken-word pieces, unfolding a panorama of irrepressible visual curiosity and intellectual inquiry.
