Landscape near Davos 

Curator: This is Jan Wiegers’s etching entitled "Landscape near Davos." What strikes you most upon seeing this piece? Editor: The chaotic energy! It feels unsettling. The jagged lines create an overwhelming density, not peaceful at all, which you might expect from a landscape. Curator: That aligns with Wiegers’s association with Expressionism. But what means allowed Wiegers to achieve this feeling? I’d consider the process. It is an etching. Lines are carved into a metal plate, areas are stopped out and then the whole image is inked and printed. Consider the physical labor involved, pushing against the resistant metal to create such frenetic marks. Editor: Interesting. The etching is what creates this dense symbolism. The lines act like pathways into a tangled collective unconscious. All these vertical tree shapes, repeated and slightly varied. Davos as a place has long been associated with healing in a sanitarium sense but the chaos could also represent internal psychic turbulence. Curator: Perhaps Wiegers's time at Davos changed his approach. In 1920, Wiegers contracted Spanish Influenza and recuperated there in the mountains, but that association feels looser to me. Instead I'm more interested in Wiegers's connection to both traditional landscape prints and new modernist aesthetics and methods of production. This etching process seems to act as his way of negotiating all of these ideas. Editor: But there is a tension, even without that biographical info. Davos as symbol of sanctuary juxtaposed with the anxiety expressed via those expressive lines. The image pulls in two directions. Curator: Perhaps those seemingly opposing ideas—serenity and unrest—aren't so far apart. It certainly makes one think about the landscape in a different way. Editor: Yes. I'll certainly not see idyllic landscapes quite the same way for a while, understanding they might just contain layers of human angst beneath.