Sprayer Harald Naegeli in his own words
Published: Monday, Jun 24th 2024, 11:00
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He is known as the "Sprayer of Zurich". But Harald Naegeli is also an illustrator, poet and pamphleteer. A new book brings together his texts with key works and interviews from 1979 to 2022. Naegeli, award-winning and prosecuted in equal measure, is not finished yet.
Since Harald Naegeli returned to Switzerland in 2020, his black spray-painted stick figures have reappeared on Zurich's facades. They peer around the corners of buildings, dance in underground parking garages and stand on people's feet on shiny sidewalks.
Naegeli continues his stroke from the wall to the floor or ceiling. That has always been the case. He grows around corners and edges - and likes to go beyond them. Accordingly, the title of the new book is an attempt to capture the incomprehensible with a quote: "You don't measure the flight of birds or the movement of clouds with a folding rule! The Sprayer of Zurich, texts and conversations 1979 - 2022".
The artist will be 85 years old in December. His attitude has hardly changed in all his creative years, as the illustrated textbook shows from his own statements.
Art as a weapon
"in view of the corruption of political processes, the only thing left to do is to reflect on art, but not or no longer as an object of meditation, as an escape from reality into a 'more beautiful world', but as a weapon," wrote Harald Naegeli in 1979 in "mein sprayen. mein revoltieren".
And in 2022, when asked by journalists from the NZZ am Sonntag whether he was reconciled with his home city in view of the art prize that Zurich had awarded him after his return, he replied: "No, there is no reconciliation. It doesn't need that, it needs opposition. Disfigurement through architecture is a crime that should not be reconciled with."
The inhospitality of cities, the concreting over of natural habitats, the disregard for animals and plants were and are what Naegeli denounces with his spray can. Shortly before the 2020 Zurich Art Prize was awarded, criminal charges of damage to property were filed against him again.
This is reminiscent of 1979, when Harald Naegeli was first caught and arrested after spraying around 1500 stick figures in Zurich. There were well over a hundred charges against him. In 1981, the High Court of the Canton of Zurich sentenced him to nine months' imprisonment and compensation payments, and he fled to Germany via Italy and France. He was arrested there in 1983, although the German art scene - above all Joseph Beuys - campaigned vehemently on his behalf. This was probably one of the reasons why Naegeli returned to Germany after serving his prison sentence and remained in "exile" there for over thirty years.
Origin in silence
Is Harald Naegeli now an old man who can no longer keep pace with change, or an artist who consistently goes his own way? In a sense, probably both. During his "exile", Zurich, like many cities in Switzerland and elsewhere, changed dramatically - not least thanks to the opposition of like-minded people.
Although street art and graffiti are still illegal, they are recognized as style-defining genres and are partly supported by the public sector. The cityscape today is more colorful and vibrant than during the building boom of the 1970s and the years that followed. In addition, cities are now actively responding to climate change and are becoming ever greener. Naegeli does not react to these changed realities - at least not in the critically conducted interviews in the book and in his new, unchanged art in urban space.
More interesting is his other, little-known graphic work. In this context, the editors of the new book, Urs Bühler (NZZ journalist) and Anna-Barbara Neumann (Managing Director of the Naegeli Foundation), contrast the extroverted sprayer with the introverted poet.
They show exemplary works from the sketchbooks filled over decades and parts of the "Urwolke" sheets, to which the artist continues to add a fine, quiet stroke to this day. How the striking line figures have grown out of this much more layered, poetic background is made comprehensible in the book by means of text and image. An aha-experience that makes you think about Harald Naegeli all over again.
*This text by Tina Uhlmann, Keystone-SDA, was realized with the help of the Gottlieb and Hans Vogt Foundation.
©Keystone/SDA
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