NO SHOW MUSEUM

*1954 in Jegensdorf, Switzerland. Lives and works in New York  

Swiss Artist  

Best known for: Invisible Paintings

Historical context: Contemporary Art, Minimal Art   

Since 1968, Swiss artist Bruno Jakob processes paintings that cannot be seen. Although working in a traditional manner with paintbrushes, different waters, and steam to draw on canvases, but instead of pigments he uses energy, light, brainwaves, touch or love. The result is that there's nothing to see for the eye of the observer – except the blank canvas.

"The world is his studio. His painting is not visually graspable in itself, irrespective of the method used, meaning irrespective of whether he works with water, ideas, touch or energy. This is what is expressed in the designation used by the artist: ‘invisible painting’. […] The first of his “Invisible Paintings” were done on his parent's farm around 1968. Before his studies he had set up a studio in which to draw and paint under the roof of his parent's house. A cardboard described by Bruno Jakob as one of the earliest works for which he used energy as a painterly tool dates from those years. When Jakob paints and draws, this cardboard is close by. His experience when painting is that one possibility of not only imagining images, but also of actually seeing them on the empty plane, is to intensely study, to concentrate his gaze on this white cardboard. This is an observation he shares with many other painters from the whole of art history. What is specific to Jakob is that he draws the conclusion not only to accept these images and let them survive as “Invisible Paintings”, but also to consistently develop his working method in that direction. He began to paint with water in 1969, initially on blotting paper. In 1973 he found a roll of transparent plastic foil at the printer's where he was working, which he has since preserved like an exposed but undeveloped film full of concealed images. To continue working on his chosen path numerous possibilities were open to him: in 1976 he put sheets of paper out in the rain so that it could depict itself, or exposed sheets of paper to fog; he laid sheets of paper along an ant road and followed individual ants that walked across the paper with a pencil; he worked in the garden, letting flies and mites compose his images by marking those spots where they alighted for a moment on the paper; he tried to draw the rain. In those years, he also produced images without solid supports. He painted on plastic sheeting and then removed the layer of paint from the plastic once it had dried. His roll- and fold-images on cotton fabric involved a combination of processes (painting, spraying, rubbing). The painted fabrics are rolled up and exhibited as partly rolled or folded images, with the result that the image as a whole remains invisible." (Roman Kurzmeyer)

Exhibited works