Events

The show combines international with regional urban art history. The exhibition begins with Brassaï and ends when Banksy's first works appeared in England. Internationally pioneering style writing and street art from 1960 onwards will be shown - with a focus on the Paris-Düsseldorf-Zurich triangle.. On display are illegally created works only. The exhibition looks at the various international developments and shows the multipliers of graffiti and street art by demonstrating the close links between pop music and street art graffiti on record covers and making this music audible. A further spotlight is placed on the connections between avant-garde art, street art and graffiti.

San Francisco was the center of bohemian culture in California in the late 1930s and 1940s. It was a golden era for art making and the blossoming of Bay Area art due to a confluence of factors, one being the activities of the San Francisco Art Association (SFAA), a group of art enthusiasts and artists who nurtured the growth of a museum and art school (the California School of Fine Arts) and organized yearly annual exhibitions that stimulated and propelled progressive art of the time. Artists like Adaline Kent were central to the development of modernist art on the west coast during the early to mid-twentieth century, and yet, until recently their influence remains largely untold in American art history. Kent was among the active members of the SFAA and her work exemplified the period’s penchant for individualism and experimentation, as did the work of artists associated with the SFAA. Other artists associated with the SFAA are Dorr Bothwell, Benjamin Bufano, Harry Crotty, Jay DeFeo, Sonia Gechtoff, Robert Boardman Howard, Sargent Johnson, Madge Knight, Knud Merrild, Henrietta Shore, Ralph Stackpole, and Clay Spohn. The exhibition, San Francisco the Golden Years 1930-1960: Making a Scene, is drawn exclusively from the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art collection. NEHMA’s collection, with its focus on the art of the western United States, is ideally suited to provide in-depth examples of art from this little-known period in art history. This is the first major exhibition and publication to look at the pivotal and colorful history of the SFAA. This exhibition is co-curated by Michael Duncan, art historian, writer, and critic, and Bolton Colburn, the NEHMA curator of collections and exhibitions. The publication accompanying the exhibition includes essays by Michael Duncan and a foreword by Bolton Colburn. The book is being published by Hirmer Publishers, Munich, Germany in conjunction with the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art, Utah State University, Logan, Utah.

"Exhibition with paintings, sculptures, installations and video works by John Bock, Maurizio Cattelan, Yayoi Kusama, Jonathan Meese, Pipilotti Rist and many other international artists*. In common parlance, an eccentric attitude is considered to be extravagant and decadent. But eccentricity is much more. Because it refuses any ideology - for the freedom of democracy. This is the basic idea behind the first exhibition on the potential of eccentricity as an aesthetic of freedom. The focus is on art from 1980 onwards, but fashion, design, film and architecture are also included in an exemplary way. ECCENTRIC celebrates the diversity and complexity of the great themes of nature, beauty, intimacy and humanism."

While a MUSEUM OF MEMORABILITY reflects on Africa's past and present from the perspective of colonial Europe, African sculptures and objects from private collections in Saarland enter into a dialogue with the machines and flywheels of the historic blower hall. The central idea of this exhibition structure is a methodical reversal of perspective. Industrial modernity, which has repeatedly darkened Europe, meets a multifaceted, illuminating African culture. Major artworks from recent decades are paired with sound and spatial installations realised especially for the show by artists from Africa and the global diaspora. This generates a dense network of impressions and modes of perception that, ideally, enables a sustained and multi-layered encounter with THE TRUE SIZE OF AFRICA in its past, present and future.

Sensuous, bold and topical – this volume with its varied illustrations studies the entire spectrum of Jewish ideas about sexuality. In doing so it examines widely-held and contradictory stereotypes, according to which Jewish tradition either supports sexuality or restricts it through stringent regulations.

The exhibition presents Leiko Ikemura's graphic works for the first time. In combination with paintings and sculptures, her artistic development over several decades and the connections between the different genres become comprehensible.

Land is a crucial foundation for life on this planet. Soil is the life-supporting link between the Earth's climate and biological diversity and provides a variety of different ecosystems that need to be restored and preserved. However, as an agricultural and industrial base, land is at risk of devastating overuse, with half of humanity already affected by the negative impacts of land degradation. Land, in all its meanings for our lives, must be put back at the centre of our agenda in order to curb the economic and social overexploitation of land resources. In order to raise public awareness of this important issue, the exhibition in cooperation with the UNCCD-G20 Global Land Initiative uses the latest media technology and combines exhibits from art, cultural history and natural science in order to understand the ecological problems and potentials of the human-influenced environments. Far from a dark vision of the future, the exhibition aims to focus on a positive narrative that inspires action for the common cause.

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner regarded the picture and its frame as a unit. Contrary to Kirchner’s intention that they belong together, over the years some paintings were separated from their original frames. In the present publication they are reunited in a remarkable exhibition, allowing us to rediscover a chapter of modernism which has often been overlooked.

Hans Haacke (b. 1936) has shaped “political art” to a greater extent than any other artist of his generation. Keen criticism of institutions, political awareness, and an uncompromising defense of democratic principles to the point of activism all characterize his approach. His work is marked by directness and theoretical clarity, and yet it is poetic, metaphorical, ecological, and in many respects highly topical at the same time. More than once his controversial artistic contributions to contemporary discourse have been excluded from exhibitions. In a wide-ranging retrospective, the Belvedere 21 will be examining Haacke’s influential oeuvre from 1959 to the present day.

Helen Frankenthaler’s (1928–2011) radical approach to paint and material makes images pulsate with color. During the postwar period in the United States, she was a leading figure in abstract art. This volume brings together nearly fifty works, providing a comprehensive overview of the world’s largest private collection of Helen Frankenthaler’s works – on display at the recently opened Museum Reinhard Ernst in Wiesbaden.

In 1996, artist and philanthropist Susan Unterberg founded the Anonymous Was a Woman (AWAW) award, making a simple, yet radical commitment to redress the lack of institutional support for women-identifying visual artists over the age of 40. She sought to provide mid-career artists with the means to procure workspace, art supplies, childcare, or whatever else they needed to further their artistic careers. For the past two and a half decades, AWAW has provided unrestricted grants of $25,000 to ten or more artists each year. Showcasing work by a selection of awardees from AWAW’s first 25 years (1996 through 2020), this exhibition explores several themes surrounding anonymity and, ultimately, celebrates the transformative impact women artists have made on contemporary art since the award’s founding. The range of artists featured in the exhibition demonstrates the demographic and aesthetic diversity of past awardees. They include Jeanne Silverthorne (AWAW 1996), Laura Aguilar (AWAW 2000), Senga Nengudi (2005), Marie Watt (AWAW 2006), Ida Applebroog (AWAW 2009), Jungjin Lee (2011), Rona Pondick (AWAW 2016), and Jennifer Wen Ma (AWAW 2019), among many others. Curated by Nancy Princenthal and Vesela Stretenović, the exhibition will be accompanied by a landmark illustrated publication featuring new essays from notable scholars and curators, as well as a roundtable conversation with Unterberg, Princenthal, and Stretenović, moderated by Lynn Gumpert, director of the Grey Art Museum at NYU. In addition, the book will include illustrations and biographies for all 251 AWAW recipients from 1996 to 2020.

Cold War to the Cosmos: Distant Early Warning Systems and the Arctic examines the strategic significance of the Arctic during the Cold War, a period defined by intense rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union. This atomic age saw the two nations rapidly advance their nuclear programs and exert influence around the world. The Cold War had a broad impact on American society, the physical landscape, and the national desire to control and even militarize outer space. American politics, art, and culture also reflected the specter of global communism and fears of nuclear war and everything from Abstract Expressionism to Jazz were enlisted for propaganda. Today’s global conflicts recall the heightened tensions and military brinkmanship of the Cold War. Competing political and religious philosophies, climate change, and a new space race to Mars prompt us to again consider the Cold War's legacy and Buckminster Fuller’s vision of "Spaceship Earth," where shared responsibility and collaboration are key to addressing contemporary issues and ensuring a sustainable future for all.

Interwar France was a period of exceptional creativity, innovation, and turbulence. Roaring: Art, Fashion, and the Automobile in France explores the role of the automobile as both subject and object from 1918–1939, untangling the impact of fashion, interiors, architecture, aviation, and the avant-garde on French automobile design and production. Roaring brings together more than 100 works of art and design, including paintings, photographs, prints, posters, furniture, lighting, architectural plans, fashion, textiles, and automobiles. Expansive and interdisciplinary, Roaring illuminates the rich, creative ecosystems that nourished this golden age of French automotive design and influenced modern concepts of mobility. The exhibition highlights the bold, untethered visions of figures like Sonia and Robert Delaunay, Jacques-Henri Lartigue, Le Corbusier, André  Citroën, and Josephine Baker, who embraced the automobile as a provocative expression of the modern age.