Events

In spring 2024, the Kunst Museum Winterthur celebrates the long-awaited reopening of the unique collection of Hedy and Arthur Hahnloser in Villa Flora with the exhibition Bienvenue! After ten years, the masterpieces now return to the comprehensively renovated home of the collectors in a new presentation. Featuring works from the Hahnloser Collection and a selection of loans, the presentation traces the advent of French modernism from Impressionism and Postimpressionism to the Nabis and Fauves. Alongside reputable artistic pioneers such as Vincent van Gogh and Paul Cézanne, works by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Édouard Manet, and Auguste Renoir are presented with bodies of works by the Hahnlosers’ artist friends from the circles of Pierre Bonnard, Félix Vallotton, Odilon Redon, and Henri Matisse. Sculpture is also included, with a significant selection of works by Auguste Rodin and Aristide Maillol. This exhibition celebrating the reopening of Villa Flora allows visitors to experience turn-of-the-century avant-garde art in unusual concentration and quality. It will now be possible to experience the ground-breaking Winterthur spirit for French modernism, particularly the unusual commitment of Hedy and Arthur Hahnloser, in the place where this first-class collection was created.

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.

"Xican–a.o.x. Body" is the first major exhibition to examine influential works by artists who foreground the Brown body as a site to explore, expand, and complicate traditional conceptions linked to Mexican, Mexican American, and Xicanx experiences. Consisting of approximately 125 artworks by about 70 artists and artist collectives, Xican–a.o.x. Body weaves a rich tapestry of diverse media, from the late 1960s through today, including Lowrider cars, poetry, pottery, painting, photography, sculpture, and film.

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.

Samia Halaby: Eye Witness follows Samia Halaby’s (b. Jerusalem, 1936) creative journey to experiment with the ways painting conveys her experiences and reflects how she sees the world around her. Halaby’s paintings, which range from miniature to monumental, 2D to 3D, and monochrome to multicolor, are notably shaped by her experiences, and shift accordingly throughout her itinerant career across the Midwest, the East coast, and the Arab world. As a self-described painter of her time, Halaby also explores how technology can enhance and transform painting. Her experimentations thus render new approaches to capturing ephemeral moments. Halaby’s paintings reflect a life of witness, one we are invited to take part in by looking slowly and closely at the artist’s work.

"Monuments and Myths" is the exhibition to examine the intersecting careers of Augustus Saint-Gaudens and Daniel Chester French, the leading American sculptors of the Gilded Age. With rich new thinking and stunning photographs, this exhibition examines the role of America’s most iconic public sculptures in the complex negotiation of national identity.

Mark Dion and Alexis Rockman: Journey to Nature’s Underworld invites visitors on a voyage of discovery into the depths of our threatened natural world through large-scale painted and sculptural works. This exhibition is the first two-person show of these artists, who share an ongoing and urgent concern for our global environmental and ecological well-being.

It is little known that the Swiss Bauhaus master Johannes Itten (1888-1967) was not only one of the prominent protagonists of modernism in painting and color theory, but also worked extensively with textile design. In the artistic pairing, he appeared alongside Bauhaus master Gunta Stölzl (1897-1983), who has gone down in art history as a “classic of textile art”. Both explore new ornamental and textile forms, avant-garde material and textile structures or the use of experimental photography in textile art in an innovative way. Based on Stölzl and Itten, an entire network of Swiss textile art can be rediscovered in a surprising way with over 100 designers. As part of this exhibition, the cabinet exhibition SOPHIE TAEUBER. TEXTILE REFORMER will be shown in the project space enter.

Surrealism – Worlds in Dialogue highlights the surrealist vision and its lasting ripple effects on subsequent generations over the last 100 years to the present day. It creates space for dialogue through the presentation of works by Surrealist avantgardists in juxtaposition to their contemporary successors, thus resulting in the artworks of the past regaining their unsettling power through a contemporary lens. Through this cross-generational encounter, the exhibition demonstrates how surrealist themes and methods still strike a chord with our zeitgeist, while tackling fundamental social-political issues. Avantgardists such as Max Ernst, Salvador Dalí, Yves Tanguy, René Magritte, Claude Cahun, among others, engage in a dialogue with contemporary artists like Cindy Sherman, Sarah Lucas, or David Lynch, shedding light on themes such as identity, gender, technology, and mental health from various perspectives.

This exhibition delves into the various circles of American artists who made France their home during the post-World War II era, and investigates the academies where many studied, the spaces where their work was exhibited, their interactions with European artists, and the overarching issue of what it meant to be an American abroad. Contrary to entrenched presumptions that Manhattan became the primary locus of art after World War II, Americans in Paris: Artists Working in Postwar France, 1946–1962 delves into the various circles of artists who made France their home during an era of intense geopolitical realignment. Bolstered by the GI Bill, many artists, such as Norman Bluhm, Ed Clark, Sam Francis, Al Held, Ellsworth Kelly, Kenneth Noland, and Jack Youngerman, along with lesser-known figures such as Robert Breer, Harold Cousins, and Shinkichi Tajiri, opted for a foreign rather than a domestic learning experience. Seasoned artists, such as Beauford Delaney, Claire Falkenstein, Carmen Herrera, Joan Mitchell, Kimber Smith, and Mark Tobey, like the GIs, were drawn to the storied modernist traditions that still flowed from this fabled City of Light. Comprising some 135 artworks by approximately 70 artists, as well as archival materials from this period, Americans in Paris investigates the academies where many of these artists studied, the spaces where their work was exhibited, the aesthetic discourses that animated their conversations, their interactions with European artists, and the overarching issue of what it meant to be an American abroad. Curated by Debra Bricker Balken with Lynn Gumpert, the exhibition is accompanied by a 300-page illustrated publication.

Robert Longo is known for his monumental photorealistic images: powerful, dynamic charcoal drawings whose virtuoso technique and visually impactful subject matter leave viewers spellbound. He models such works on photographs that apprehend dramatic situations at their climaxes. The artist’s concern here is to shed light on power—in nature, in politics, and in history. Longo makes use of images already published thousands of times that have become part of our popular culture, often even part of our collective memory. He isolates and reduces his selected motifs with an eye to heightening their visual impact.

Delve into a collection a century in the making with "Legendary Selections from the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts", a handbook highlighting the museum’s collection of legendary artworks from the United States and around the world, encompassing works by celebrated artists from Ansel Adams to Kay Walking Stick.

What we call the beginning is often the end And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from. These lines by T. S. Eliot from Little Gidding, the last of the Four Quartets, written in London in 1942, provide Anne Duk Hee Jordan with the title of her first institutional solo exhibition in Austria. The end is where we start from articulates a circular motion that she evokes in the exhibition space both thematically and physically. According to the artist, who was born in Korea in 1978 and raised in Germany, “to fully understand ecology we need to think in circles without interruption.” The exhibition, which she developed specifically for KunstHausWien, consists of two worlds, each of which takes up one floor of the building: the Archean Eon, the period of time when life first emerged and an atmosphere of breathing, as well as a magically fluorescent underwater world that allows visitors to dive into the depths of the ocean, which is populated by fantastic creatures and microscopic phytoplankton.

Today, Erwin Wurm (*1954 Bruck/Mur) numbers among the world’s most successful and well-known contemporary artists. On the occasion of Wurm’s 70th birthday, ALBERTINA MODERN is presenting a first-ever sweeping retrospective featuring his diverse oeuvre in all artistic media.

George Washington Carver was a pioneer of plant-based engineering and one of the nation’s earliest proponents of sustainable agriculture. In the early 1900s, he built his “Jesup Wagon,” a moveable school to share soil and plant samples, equipment, and other agricultural knowledge with farmers. Carver’s then-radical ideas—including organic fertilizers, crop rotation, and plant-based medicines and construction materials—are now recognized as the forerunners of modern conservation. A trained and practicing artist, Carver used sustainable materials such as peanut- and clay-derived dyes and paints in his many weavings and still-life paintings. World Without End explores how contemporary artists and thinkers working today engage with Carver’s ideas and interests. Alongside contemporary artworks by thirty artists and artist collectives, the exhibition includes Carver’s rarely seen paintings, drawings, laboratory equipment, and notebooks. Both the exhibition and its forthcoming catalogue, which includes previously unpublished material documenting Carver’s life and work at Tuskegee University, reframe and center Carver’s lasting impact on art and science.

Black Ancient Futures brings together a significant group of 11 artists from the vast African diaspora, some of them presented for the first time in Portugal, who employ different languages to propose a wide range of alternative narratives and landscapes that contest the dominant panorama of the contemporary arts. The works on display are the result of the combination of specific features of African culture with other cultures and other geographical spaces, and reveal the original energy of the itinerant fate of the African condition – of exile and settlement, demanded by the context of slavery, or of voluntary or forced migration as a result of the current global economic, political, and climate crises – offering a universe of creative possibilities. «These proposals neither illustrate a historically defined trend or movement nor advocate a specific ideological reading; rather, they call on diverse techniques, disciplines and languages, combining frenzied fantasies of form, colour, and sound, material experiences, thematic and temporal leaps, and direct references to non-Western spiritualities with the use or evocation of post-industrial technology to create magical or science-fictional narratives.» write the curators Camila Maissune e João Pinharanda in the exhibition text.

The artist group Brücke is Germany’s most important contribution to international modernism. The group was formed in Dresden in 1905 by the four young architecture students Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Otto Bleyl, Erich Heckel and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. Together they developed a painting style with vivid colours, simplified forms and large colour fields that express internal feelings, rather than reproducing an external reality.

Smith’s adventurous approach to three-dimensional form has permanently expanded the vocabulary and range of sculptural practice. The first American artist to make welded metal sculptures and incorporate industrial means in his work, Smith’s enlistment of nature as material and prime setting for his art was equally innovative.

The Alte Nationalgalerie will be presenting Claude Monet’s three earliest views of Paris, from 1867, which are considered to be the first Impressionist cityscapes. They inspired artists such as Gustave Caillebotte (1848–1894) and Camille Pissarro (1830–1903) to produce paintings of the modern city under renewal.

The Portuguese-British artist Paula Rego (1935–2022) ranks among the foremost and most exciting figurative painters of recent decades. The Kunstmuseum Basel mounts her first exhibition in Switzerland, showcasing key works from the oeuvre she built in over half a century. The fabulous world of Portuguese-British artist Paula Rego enthrals us with a frenzy of images, replete with cryptic humour, and as frankly dramatic as they are poignant. Rego’s oeuvre commands enormous power, above all where the fates of women are at stake. Figures, who in Walt Disney’s world represent perfect princesses or otherworldly witches, are in Rego’s hands depicted as perfectly natural women. In her work, it is women – nurturing, aiding and coping with everyday life – who merit portrayal. One thing never featuring in her works, however, is the happy end. Throughout the decades, Rego has crafted complex, highly charged scenes of nightmarish proportions, revealing profound insights into human relations, into the dynamics of social, political and sexual power. The Neue Zürcher Zeitung referred to her artworks as “crime scenes."

Rembrandt van Rijn (1606 Leiden – 1669 Amsterdam) was the most important Dutch painter of the 17th century. A large number of pupils worked in his atelier for decades. By imitating his style, they contributed to his fame and the establishment of the Rembrandt "brand". Rembrandt's teaching was innovative in many respects.

A long research project has, for the first time, explored how artists of the modern era became interested in medieval art. The exhibition rewrites the history of modern art. Featured artists include Arnold Böcklin, Lucas Cranach the Elder, Akseli Gallen-Kallela, Theodor Kittelsen, Käthe Kollwitz, Edvard Munch, Hugo Simberg, Helene Schjerfbeck and Marianne Stokes. In addition to paintings and prints, the exhibition includes objects, sculptures and furniture.

'What is Enlightenment?' asked pastor Johann Friedrich Zöllner in 1783, writing for the Berliner Monatsschrift. The editors of the monthly magazine picked up on this question and put it to their readers, thus igniting a debate that would shape the course of philosophy. The exhibition, titled 'What is Enlightenment? Questions for the Eighteenth Century', likewise explores this term from many sides. It concentrates on the most important debates of that era, taking its contradictions and ambivalence into account by revealing conflicts over concepts and demands, rather than presenting the Enlightenment as a homogeneous, progressive undertaking. In doing so, it also aims to make clear that the ideas of equality and tolerance prevalent then do not correspond to those held today and, moreover, were often not implemented in practice. The Enlightenment is often referred to in current debates about the social issues of today and about democracy as a form of government. The exhibition is also meant to provide a historical context for these conversations.

Narrative Wisdom and African Arts explores how historical and contemporary African arts make visible narratives rooted in collective and individual memory and knowledge. The exhibition acknowledges the intersections between certain historical arts and oral traditions and places historical works made by artists across sub-Saharan Africa during the 13th to 20th centuries in conversation with contemporary works by African artists working around the globe.

"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."

The Hunter College Art Galleries are pleased to present Acts of Art in Greenwich Village, the first comprehensive account of the six-year history of Acts of Art, a gallery dedicated to showcasing the work of Black artists in downtown Manhattan. Benny Andrews, James Denmark, Reginald Gammon, Harlan Jackson, Nigel Jackson, Ben Jones, Loïs Mailou Jones, Dindga McCannon, Ademola Olugebefola, Enid Richardson, Ann Tanksley, Lloyd Toone, Frank Wimberley, Hale Woodruff Founded by artists Nigel Jackson and Patricia Grey in 1969, Acts of Art was first located at 31 Bedford Street and later moved to 15 Charles Street in the West Village. In 1971, the gallery mounted Rebuttal to the Whitney Museum Exhibition, the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition’s strategic response to the Whitney’s concurrent Contemporary Black Artists in America. That same year, the gallery hosted the inaugural exhibition of the Black women artists collective Where We At. Before Acts of Art closed in 1975, it presented one- and two-person exhibitions by twenty-six different artists, and numerous group exhibitions. Acts of Art in Greenwich Village centers Acts of Art and its director’s curatorial vision, tracing the gallery’s exhibition history as it intersects with other histories of Black art and artists in New York—and with formations like the BECC, Where We At, and the Weusi Artists. Installed in Hunter College’s Leubsdorf Gallery, the exhibition features artworks from the late 1960s and 1970s by fourteen artists with close ties to the gallery, a number of which were first shown at Acts of Art.

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 SCHIRN will be examining Haacke’s influential oeuvre from 1959 to the present day.

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.