Untitled 9. | Jean Willi

Willi, Jean (Basel, Switzerland 1945) Painter, writer and columnist for various European publications. He discovered Ibiza in 1973 on his way back from a trip to Africa. He stayed there for six months and began to paint. Two of his paintings from that stay were exhibited at the Ivan Spence gallery, but his work as an advertising draftsman in Basel and Paris required him. However, he tried to find a way to dedicate himself exclusively to painting and thought again of Ibiza. He settled there definitively in 1975. On the island he interacted with other artists such as Felix Waske, Erwin Bechtold, Eduard Micus and Zush and exhibited

at the El Mensajero gallery in Santa Eulària. He developed several techniques ranging from drawing and engraving to minimalist symbols and automatic writing. With the latter he acquired a certain fame by recording news texts at the Alte Frankfurter Oper or the famous novel by James Joyce Ulysses which is read every June 6 on the occasion of Bloomsday on Irish radio for 30 hours straight. This work was exhibited the following year at the Gutenberg Museum in Mainz. He held multiple exhibitions in Ibiza, Switzerland and Germany. In the eighties he began to investigate another field: literature. In 1989 his first novel was

published in the form of a chronicle that describes the coexistence of the Ibizan farmers of Corona with newcomers from all over the world. ‚Der Tag von Santa Inés’ was translated into Catalan in 2009.