Category Archives: Shows

Frozen Gesture

May 18 – Aug 18, 2019

In 1965 Roy Lichtenstein created his famous «brushstrokes» and in so doing transformed the subjective gesture of heroic Modernism into a trivial comic drawing, transposed into the large format of a museum. The spontaneous movement of the brush on canvas mutated into a quote, the emotional exploration of depth morphed into a Pop surface in signal colors. The purported immediacy of the expressive painterly act thus became an ironic reflection on the medium of painting using the means of mass culture. This distanced and self-reflective approach had defined contemporary painting since the end of Modernism. It highlighted the fundamental elements of the image, such as the appearance of the colors and the pigment, the color fields and their limits, and not least the application of paint in the form of a gesture.

This gesture had long since abandoned directly expressing existence in favor of any number of different discursive strategies and painterly approaches. To this day, artists underscore the problematic nature of the impact of the application of color and are forever reinterpreting it – from the gesture as a semiotic abbreviation for painting through to its diverse transformations in images.

In the form of the extensive «Frozen Gesture» exhibition Kunst Museum Winterthur is presenting the sheer range of gestures in contemporary painting. The exhibition brings together important individual pieces by outstanding protagonists of Abstract Art, such as Gerhard Richter and David Reed, with extensive work groups of contemporary artists such as Franz Ackermann, Pia Fries, Katharina Grosse and Judy Millar – to create a fascinating display of works of exceptional painterly quality and inconceivable sensory appeal.

40 Jahre KUNSTKABINETT

Apr 13 – Jun 24, 2019

Opening: Apr 12, 2019, 8 pm

Günther Uecker
Günther Förg
Antoni Tàpies
Heinz Mack
A. R. Penck
Otto Piene
Katharina Grosse
Eduardo Chillida
Helge Leiberg
Elvira Bach
Armin Göhringer
Paul Flora
Feng Lu
Gerhard Rießbeck
Peter Hermann
Manfred Sillner
Peter Ernst Mehr

The Way We Are 1.0

Mar 30, 2019 – Jan 5, 2020

Opening: Mar 29, 2019, 7 pm

Starting at the end of March 2019, the collection presentation “The Way We Are 1.0” will be featured on two floors constituting more than half of the overall exhibition space of the Weserburg. The exhibition includes works from a large number of collections, some of which have enjoyed a long association with the institution while others are new additions; also on display will be works from the Weserburg’s own collection as well as loans by artists who will be participating in a show at the Weserburg for the first time. The Way We Are 1.0 investigates more than one hundred and forty works by eighty artists from various contexts and times with regard to both their contents and their form. This focus gives rise to a succession of spaces which identify the thread connecting works of art from the 1960s all the way to today and which approach the themes of these works from various perspectives. The exhibition tracks down images of nature or special aspects of daily life; it explores such themes as the body, time or memory; it turns its attention to urban spaces or characteristics of language; and it presents fundamental positions of painterly abstraction or minimalist formal language.

TRANSVERSAL. LANDSCAPES FROM THE COLLECTION

Mar 16 – Nov 24, 2019

The focus of the collection at the Graubünden Art Museum is on Swiss art with reference to the canton Graubünden, and for several years now also on international contemporary art relevant to the mountain canton. Part of this is the impact of the mountain landscape as well as the interplay between emigration and tourism. Mountains are places of myths but also of conquest. When the English travelled through Europe during their “Grand Tour” they discovered the Alps as being a spectacular site for their adventures. Today’s identity of the Alpine region is significantly characterised by this external viewpoint.
While artists grapple with vistas, panoramas, topographies and specific places, they also shape our ideas of landscape. In the collection presentation TRANSVERSAL, which includes selected items on loan, various aspects of landscape representations are thematised.

The Collection (1) | Highlights for a Future

Mar 16 – Sep 29, 2019

On the occasion of its 20th anniversary, S.M.A.K. is presenting ‘The Collection (I): Highlights for a Future’ which includes about 200 works from the collection and, like the opening in 1999, it will occupy the whole museum. In this exhibition, S.M.A.K. wants to look mainly at the present and the future. Well-known classics, outstanding newer works and also recent additions to the collection are to be used to show the position of the museum and of art in contemporary reality and to make new links with other, sometimes surprising and less well-known works in the collection.

NEWS! Acquisitions in the context of the collection

Mar 9 – Jun 16, 2019

Collecting art was what prompted the establishment of the Kunstgesellschaft Luzern in 1819, and in addition to preserving, exploring and mediating art it is still a major objective of the Kunstmuseum Luzern to this day.

News! presents new treasures in the context of works that have been in the collection for some time already. Thus the Bezauberte Knabe (Enchanted Boy) by Ferdinand Hodler meets Sharon Lockhart’s photographs of the Polish girl Milena, José Júlio de Souza Pinto shows how a grandfather teaches his grandson, while Laure Prouvost spins stories about her lost grandfather. Visitors can look into the starry sky with Ugo Rondinone and Claude Sandoz, take a walk in the forest with Hans Emmenegger, Robert Zünd and Jos Näpflin, or visit Cuno Amiet or Markus Raetz in their studios. This unfailingly surprising encounter between and with works is sensual, profound and humorous and demonstrates just how well the new acquisitions can be integrated into a collection that has existed for 200 years.basum

ON THE NEW – YOUNG SCENES IN VIENNA

Mar 1 – Jun 2, 2019

What are young artist who live and work in Vienna interested in? What subjects are in the air, what strategies do they use? The exhibition On the New. Young Scenes in Vienna is conceived as a stroll through local art communities: it brings together 18 individual artistic approaches as well as 12 independent exhibition spaces. In this show, specifically produced works are juxtaposed with specially arranged exhibitions within the exhibition; artistic and curatorial formats combine to create a dynamic entity that will change over the course of the show.

HYPER! A JOURNEY INTO ART AND MUSIC

Mar 1 – Aug 4, 2019

Opening: Feb 28, 2019, 7 pm

Sound, vision, film, a destroyed piano: What happens when musicians make use of ideas and strategies from the art world? And what kind of pictures result when painters are influenced by music? To be interested in the lives of others, to pursue the unknown, to copy it, to use it in one’s own work – in short: to conduct a cross-mapping between the worlds of music and the visual arts: this is the subject of the exhibition HYPER! A JOURNEY INTO ART AND MUSIC curated by the former editor-in-chief of Spex and Electronic Beats, Max Dax.

Writing the History of the Future (The ZKM Collection)

Feb 23, 2019 – Mar 28, 2021

The collection of the ZKM | Karlsruhe is one of the largest media art collections in the world. It exemplifies the transformation of art in the face of changing production, reception and distribution technologies. Artists react to the change in the media and sometimes anticipate developments that will become self-evident for society as a whole only years later: they are the story of the future.

BLUE IS THE COLOR OF YOUR EYES

Feb 2, 2019 – Jan 26, 2020

Blue Is the Color of Your Eyes is an exhibition where works by Louise Bourgeois guide us through an examination of issues of materiality and abstraction. The exhibition features, apart from Bourgeois, a group of internationally active artists who discuss and challenge sculptural and painterly expression in a variety of ways. The title Blue Is the Color of Your Eyes is taken from a work by Bourgeois that is on view in the exhibition.

Image and Sight – Seeing in Modernism

Aug 11, 2018 – Jul 7, 2019

“The viewer is in the picture” – this formulation coined by the art historian Wolfgang Kemp indicates that the artist considers the viewer in the conception of his work and thus determines his standpoint before the picture. The path of abstraction in the 20th century is accompanied by a concentration on painterly means as well as the handling of the surface of the canvas. It poses the question concerning the impact of foregoing figurative and narrative elements on the perception of the picture. What role is assigned to the viewer when the canvas no longer functions as the ‘open window’ (‘una finestra aperta’) described by the Italian artist and writer Leon Battista Alberti?

For the viewer, focusing on the surface of the canvas – and thus on painting itself – gives rise to varied possibilities. While the strict geometrical areas cast the viewer’s gaze back to his own realm of reality, gestural techniques like those employed by Jackson Pollock generate the illusion of a space behind the canvas. White paintings, which simulate infinity as a targeted depiction of nothingness, have similar effects. Rhythmic structures, by contrast, fix the viewers gaze on the surface of the canvas. Beginning in the 1960s, artists invited the viewer to enter into a direct if not even physical interaction with the work of art.

PAS DE DEUX – RÖMISCH-GERMANISCHES KOLUMBA

Sep 15, 2017 – Aug 20, 2019

The cooperation between the Art Museum of the Archdiocese of Cologne and the Roman-Germanic Museum raises the question of the existential, multifaceted conditions of being human. Issues such as time and standstill, identity and creation, power and family, beauty and joie de vivre, but also the expectation of death and the longing for death have a fundamental significance in view of the current world situation.