Sculptor, photographer, and master of artistic staging, Medardo Rosso (1858–1928) revolutionised sculpture around 1900 and became a role model for countless artists. Despite his significant influence, the artist is relatively unknown today. The exhibition “Medardo Rosso. Inventing Modern Sculpture” (Medardo Rosso. Die Erfindung der modernen Skulptur) aims to better understand his work.
The extensive retrospective at the Kunstmuseum Basel offers an opportunity to discover Rosso’s work in an overview exhibition featuring approximately 50 sculptures and around 250 photographs and drawings. It is also a chance to re-examine the development of modern sculpture.

This creates cross-generational encounters from Rosso’s time to the present, including works by Constantin Brâncuși, Edgar Degas, Eva Hesse, Meret Oppenheim, Auguste Rodin, and Alina Szapocznikow, Francis Bacon, Phyllida Barlow, Louise Bourgeois, Isa Genzken, Alberto Giacometti, Richard Serra, Georges Seurat, Andy Warhol, Francesca Woodman, Umberto Boccioni, Miriam Cahn, Giorgio de Chirico, Marcel Duchamp, Henry Moore, Meret Oppenheim, Odilon Redon, and other artists.

The exhibition, created in collaboration with the mumok (Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien), allows for exploring his radical and cross-media investigations of form (and formlessness), material, and technique. Even before Italian Futurism, which also drew on Rosso, he advocated for a radical and fundamental break with tradition.
“Medardo Rosso is undoubtedly the greatest living sculptor,” wrote Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918) in the Parisian magazine L’Europe nouvelle after a studio visit to the artist. The Italian (Turin) Rosso lived in Paris for three decades from 1889 and returned to his homeland, Italy, in his later years.

In Paris, he made contact with the Impressionists and met Auguste Rodin (1840–1917), with whom he worked on a radical redefinition of sculpture. He also wrote numerous art-theoretical texts.
To overcome outdated ideas about representation, production, and perception, he believed a fundamental “revitalization” of sculpture was necessary: “There is no painting, there is no sculpture, there is only one thing that lives.” The human scale, the fragmented and thus intimate staging, and the moving, blurred edges of his figures contrast with the demands of monumental sculpture, which was common at the time, and thus with centuries-old sculptural traditions.

Rosso also pursued similar goals thematically and materially. Instead of heroic stories, he increasingly dedicated himself to the people of everyday life and created works that sought to capture the essence of a fleeting moment.
For his figures, Rosso used bronze and more ephemeral materials such as wax and plaster, which until then were mainly used only for designs or as aids in sculpture. Their softness and malleability give them a fleeting impression – a reason why his sculptures were also celebrated as the sculptural version of Impressionism.


From 1900 onwards, Rosso systematically incorporated photography into his design process. He photographed his figures and exhibited the images together with his sculptures, works by contemporaries, and copies of artworks from other eras as ensembles. Through this staging, the space around the works became part of the sculpture.
Rosso valued engaging in a relationship, in “conversation,” with his surroundings, as he put it: capturing the special moment when the motif suddenly emerges and becomes active.
(Source and further information: Heike Eipeldauer (Ed.), Medardo Rosso. The Invention of Modern Sculpture, Cologne, 2025; Kunstmuseum Basel; Museo Medardo Rosso; Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig).


