Category Archives: Shows

La Luce Alpina

Sep 28 – Dec 1, 2019

Opening: Sep 27, 2019, 6 pm

Giovanni Segantini (1858–1899) is one of the most important painters of the late nineteenth century. In his paintings he created the image of an existence in harmony with nature. The simple, rural figures are embedded in the eternal cycle of the seasons, of birth, existence, and death. Beginning in 1887, in his Graubünden alpine scenes, the artist meticulously depicted the mountain landscape in allegorical visions of radiant luminosity, as a kind of painterly alternative to the reality of urban life. While Segantini, with his idealistic visions, is considered one of the main representatives of European Symbolism around the fin de siècle, Italian Divisionism, which was greatly influenced by him, shows him to be an innovator of painting.
Contemporary artworks will be grouped around the central series of works from the Otto Fischbacher Giovanni Segantini Foundation and other loans from public and private collections. The specific contributions by Dove Allouche (*1972), Philippe Rahm (*1967), Patrick Rohner (*1959), and Not Vital (*1948) revolve around the perception of mountains and the experience of nature from our present-day perspective. The exhibition will take place on the occasion of the 200th anniversary of the St. Gallen-based company Christian Fischbacher and will be an homage to the Otto Fischbacher Giovanni Segantini Foundation.

Monika Brandmeier

Sep 22 – Nov 17, 2019

Monika Brandmeier (*1959 in Kamen) studierte an der Fachhochschule Dortmund, der Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Braunschweig und schließlich an der Kunstakademie Düsseldorf als Meisterschülerin von Erich Reusch. Seit 2001 ist sie Professorin für Bildhauerei an der Hochschule für Bildende Künste Dresden.

Seit Ende der 1980er Jahre arbeitet Monika Brandmeier an Zeichnungen und Skulpturen, die klar und reduziert anmuten und doch wenig mit minimalistischen Positionen zu tun haben. Vielmehr folgen sie der Idee eines poetisch organisierten Raums und eines subjektiven Konzeptualismus.

In der für Recklinghausen geplanten Ausstellung werden sowohl Objekte als auch Installationen gezeigt. Dabei entstehen zahlreiche neue Werke, die sich mit der Situation des Kunstbunkers auseinandersetzen.

Mask

Sep 1, 2019 – Jan 5, 2020

Opening: Aug 31, 2019, 6 pm

Masks make us think of Carnival, of the rituals of African tribes, of death masks, theatre, film and fashion, as well as of role play, disguise and protection. Masks are an ancient, often controversial object of human cultural history. And masks also have a long tradition in the visual arts. But how is the subject being addressed in contemporary art?

The international group exhibition at the Aargauer Kunsthaus looks into this matter. Interest in masks among contemporary artists focuses not just on the mask as an object but also, and in particular, on its social, cultural and political implications. Between the opposite poles of showing and hiding and in a society in which skilful self-presentation is regarded as an indicator of personal success, the mask is highly topical. This motivates many artists to take up the subject and diagnose and reassess both the concept and the object from a contemporary point of view.

Papier – Farbe – Malerei

Aug 25 – Sep 29, 2019

Opening: Aug 28, 2019, 11 am

Der aktuellen „neo-konkreten“ Farbmalerei können erweiterte Ausdrucksmöglichkeiten und bemerkenswerte Wahrnehmungspotentiale zugeschrieben werden. Diese interessanten Qualitätsmerkmale basieren nicht zuletzt auf den vielfältigen Möglichkeiten unterschiedlichster Wechselwirkungen zwischen den angewandten Farben/Farbpigmenten (Öl, Acryl, Lack, Aquarell, Eitempera, Harz, Wachs etc.) und diversen Trägermaterialien. Das Spektrum „klassischer“ Träger (z.B. Papier, Leinwand) erfährt dabei u.a. durch Holz (MDF), Metalle (Aluminium, Kupfer), Stein, Glas, Plexiglas und Gips neue und spannende Erweiterungen.

Wie der Titel der geplanten Gruppenausstellung verdeutlicht, liegt der Fokus dieses Projektes auf der Präsentation von Werken gemalter Farbe auf Papier. Konkrete zeichnerische oder graphische Arbeiten bleiben außen vor. Gezeigt werden nicht nur zweidimensionale, d.h. flächige, an der Wand angebrachte, Farb-Arbeiten, sondern auch Werke, die in die Dreidimensionalität ausgreifen und als plastische Objekte den Raum besetzen. Darüber hinaus spielen installative Erscheinungsformen und ‚last but not least‘ auch Farbbücher/ Farbtagebücher, in denen das Medium Buch nicht über das geschriebene Wort als üblicher Informationsträger fungiert, eine Rolle. Einbezogen werden Farb-Künstlerbücher, die dem Charakter eines autonomen Kunstwerks entsprechen…

Dazwischen

Jul 21 – Nov 3, 2019

Dazwischen war noch Platz. Nicht viel, aber genug für kleinere Formate. Vor dem Zwischen waren bereits die großen Leinwandbilder von François Morellet da. Linien und Striche, kurz oder lang, vertikal oder diagonal, systematisch berechnet oder nach dem Zufall verteilt, immer schwarz auf weiß.
Zwischen diese Morelletschen Geradlinigkeiten mischt sich nun eine bunte Reihe von Bildern und Objekten, die über einen Zeitraum von 50 Jahren gesammelt wurden, exakt 18 Werke von 17 internationalen Künstlern.

Hier und Heute. Neue Kunst vom See.

Jul 14 – Sep 15, 2019

Die zeitgenössische und aktuelle Kunst in der vielfach vernetzten Vierländerregion Bodensee steht im Mittelpunkt der zweiten Überblicksausstellung mit Werken aus der Sammlung im Kunstmuseum Singen. Heute sind der Bodenseeraum und der deutsche Südwesten Schnittpunkte und Orte des Austausches zwischen den Kunstzentren in Deutschland und der Schweiz. Nicht wenige Künstler, die in den Zentren agieren, haben einen zweiten Standort in der Region. Einige bekannte Künstler kommen aus der Euregio Bodensee; bekannte, hier lebende Künstler tragen zu einem lebendigen Kunst- und Ausstellungsleben bei.

Headroom

Jul 13 – Sep 1, 2019

Opening: Jul 12, 2019, 7 pm

Layer by layer, form by form, Dave Bopp develops his abstract compositions. The result is an oscillating cosmos, lush yet filigree. The colours shine, the forms proliferate, the richness of detail invites one to lose oneself. Isn’t there a mountain, a leaf, a body part? Pictures come up and disappear. Everything swirls and flows. Painting close to visual overload. Dave Bopp’s works conquer space. They are walkable, hang over the heads and strain the dimensions of the walls. In the exhibition, space is the limit and the limit is the goal.

Headroom is Dave Bopp’s first institutional overview show.

Mural: Jackson Pollock | Katharina Grosse

Jul 1, 2019 – Feb 23, 2020

Stretching nearly twenty feet wide by eight feet high, Mural (1943) is the largest painting Jackson Pollock (1912–1956) ever made, and it proved a breakthrough for the artist. Across the painting’s dense and vibrant surface, Pollock’s bold brushstrokes appear to dance rhythmically. Today, Mural is recognized as one of the pivotal achievements of Pollock’s career, the moment when he left figuration behind, expanded the scale of his work, and started to develop his signature drip technique. “I took one look at it,” the critic Clement Greenberg later said, “and I knew Jackson was the greatest painter this country had produced.”

At the MFA, Mural is presented alongside a newly commissioned work by German painter Katharina Grosse (b. 1961). Known for her large-scale site-related installations, Grosse is one of the most important painters of her generation. Since the late 1990s, she has used an industrial paint-sprayer to apply prismatic swaths of color to a variety of surfaces, eroding the distinction between two and three dimensions to create immersive visual experiences.

The unprecedented pairing of Pollock and Grosse’s work demonstrates how the artists have each transformed painting through their innovative techniques and approaches to color on a massive scale.

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.

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.

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.

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.