St. Moritz in Jean-Michel Basquiat in St. Moritz

The thing that has stuck with me from the 1988 movie Beaches is Bette Midler’s character saying, “But enough about me; let’s talk about you. What do YOU think of me?”

a black painted stick figure of a skier in profile with a rectangular body and a cyclopic eye over a toothy grin on a red background fills the cover the jean-michel basquiat engadin exhibition cover, overlapping slightly with the show/book title, printed in a sans-serif white, from the exhibition in st moritz by hauser & wirth gallery.
Skifahrer, 1983, (detail) on the cover of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Engadin, $25 at Hauser & Wirth Shop

In completely unrelated news, this season the St. Moritz location of Hauser & Wirth is staging Jean-Michel Basquiat. Engadin:

‘Jean-Michel Basquiat. Engadin’ traces the renowned artist’s connections to the country, which began in 1982 with his first show at Galerie Bruno Bischofberger in Zurich, returning over a dozen times to St. Moritz, Zurich, and Appenzell, as well as other places in Switzerland. The Engadin region in particular continued to fascinate Basquiat long after his return to New York, resulting in a body of work that captures his impressions of the Swiss Alpine landscape and culture through the lens of his highly distinctive and personal artistic language.

As if Bischofberger hadn’t done enough for the culture of Engadin by putting it on the back of Artforum every month, here is a whole show about an entire body of work Basquiat made on those mean straßen of S-chanf.

It feels comical to make a conceptual Basquiat T-shirt at this point, and anyway, a T-shirt with Skifahrer (Skier), 1983, on it has probably already come and gone at a Uniqlo popup in Samedan. Instead I would stitch a transparent document pouch between a pair of custom-dyed red flannel braces, and on Chalandamarz I’d put the exhibition catalogue on my chest like a breastplate and head into town with a cowbell, a whip, and a song.

four pink swiss teenagers, arms linked, in traditional engadin dress lead a procession of smaller children down a city street in st moritz for chalandamarz 2024, the march 1st festival to ring forth the spring with cowbells and chase away winter spirits with whips. the girls wear plastic bag ponchos over their elaborately embroidered dresses. the boys wear ersatz knickers held up by red flannel braces. the boy on the left, with the cream cable knit sweater and shoulder-length hair, looks straight at the camera. the handpainted panel of a portrait of a cow or something that normally goes on his chest, framed by the braces, has been replaced by photoshop with the red exhibition catalogue of jean-michel basquiat engadin, and the skier. it is possible, even probable, that chalandamarz motifs should be forward-looking, like a cow on green grass, and not winter-oriented, like a skier. but we make conceptual art gestures with the world we're given, and the exhibition at hauser & wirth feels like one part of a larger swiss interest in themselves, and themselves as connoisseurs and patrons of and a culture apart from, basquiat's. so i hope the gemeinde st moritz will understand a slight liberty taken with this holiday reference, while appreciating, if not exaggerating, the attention and appreciation of engadin culture itself.
Chalandamarz Basquiatkatalogträgenprüfen, 2025, image via

I can’t believe I got to the end of this post without referencing Rob Storr’s description of Basquiat’s montage painting, The Dutch Settlers (1982) as “Eye Rap.” d’oh.

Jean-Michel Basquiat. Engadin, 14 December 2024-29 March 2025 [hauserwirth via greg.org hero chris]
watch the trailer. watch the film. [youtube]
pre-order the catalogue [shop.hauserwirth]