Exhibition «Ficht Tanner – A Drawn Life» — open art museum

Every line, every motif in Ficht Tanner’s work encapsulates an experience. The exhibition Ficht Tanner – A Drawn Life traces the life of the Trogen-based artist through his drawings.

Ficht Tanner experiences and describes a world in which sounds become forms and colors echo like voices. To celebrate his 75th birthday, the open art museum presents this exhibition of his life’s work in drawings.

These synesthetic experiences give rise to an inner exploration that permeates his entire body of work: music and song, drawings and paintings, embroidery, poems, and thoughts. In this context, the artist appears as a traveler of the spirit, a “world-dream-traveler”—a true psychonaut who feels his way forward through visions, intuitions, and poetic impulses.

Ficht Tanner (b. 1952) is an exceptional artist who defies categorization. Artistic embroiderer, musician, free spirit, thinker, mystic, bon vivant: the Appenzell native seems to embody all of these. He became known as a musician (“Appenzeller Space Schöttl” with Töbi Tobler). Yet for him, music and image are inseparable; sound is both color and sign. Drawing is the medium that has always accompanied Ficht Tanner.