Agenda

Bridget Riley (1931) is one of the most prominent representatives of post-war abstract painting. The starting point of the exhibition Bridget Riley: Looking and Seeing, Doing and Making is a visit she made to Egypt from 1979–to 1980. This trip had a profound effect on the development of her colour work.

Bridget Riley has made the selection of works with which she retraces the twenty-year creative period following that visit. The exhibition includes rarely shown preliminary work, drawings and studies, which reveal Bridget Riley’s day-to-day life in her studio. She explores the dynamics of colour, form, and pictorial space with great precision and playful ease.

Both Bridget Riley and Paul Klee drew artistic inspiration from their respective travels to North Africa. In 1914, Paul Klee travelled to Tunisia, where he experienced a “breakthrough into colour.” Later, when he went to Egypt in 1928, he was struck by the relationships between light and colour and the cultural landscape in the Nile Valley.

Bridget Riley visited Egypt in the winter of 1979/1980. The tomb paintings in ancient places of worship, the architecture, and the abrupt contrast between desert and vegetation in the Nile Valley had a lasting impact on her. She also studied the technique of Egyptian painting, which led her to develop the so-called Egyptian palette, consisting of seven colours: turquoise, blue, red, yellow and green, black and white.

The exhibition begins with the stripe paintings of the early 1980s, which are based on the Egyptian palette. It demonstrates how this artistic turning point reverberated in Riley’s work through the early 2000s.

Most of the 44 works displayed in the exhibition are part of Bridget Riley’s collection. They are supplemented with works from the Sammlung Lambrecht-Schadeberg, Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen and the Kirkland Collection.

The 17 paintings and 27 studies illustrate a crucial period in Riley’s artistic development and offer an extraordinary insight into the artist’s everyday working life.

Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) wrote Yo-Greco (I El Greco) and El Greco Vélazquez inspirarme (El Greco Velázquez inspire me) on his first drawings after viewing works by these old masters in the Museo del Prado.

Picasso was studying at the art academy in Madrid and discovered his artistic partners for life. He remained, in his own words, in permanent dialogue with these masters throughout his career.

El Greco

El Greco (Doménikos Theotokópoulos, 1541-1614) was soon forgotten after his death, although he had been a successful painter. As the name suggests, he was of Greek origin (Crete), when Venice ruled the island. Byzantine art and icons were his sources of inspiration. El Greco left for Venice in 1567. There he came into contact with Titian (1490-1576), Tintoretto (1518-1594) and other masters.

He settled in Rome in 1572 and got in touch with Spanish artists. In Rome, he  became acquainted with the artistic inspiration of the Council of Trent (1543-1563) and its Baroque and Mannerism soon afterwards.

In 1577, he moved to the court of the Spanish King Philip II (1527-1598) and his new palace El Escorial in Madrid. However, El Greco did not receive the commissions and recognition he expected, and he left for Toledo, where he settled as a free artist. This position allowed him to develop his style. 

Picasso

At the end of the nineteenth century, artists and art dealers rediscovered his qualities as a ‘modern’ artist in terms of composition and colours. For Picasso, he was the founder of Cubism, which Picasso subsequently gave a place in art history through his Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907).

El Greco and Picasso

The exhibition (Picasso – El Greco) shows the intense artistic attention of Picasso for El Greco. Picasso did not call it an imitation but a dialogue. Diego Velázquez (1599-1660) and Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669) also belonged to his ‘conversation group’. In 1967, Picasso expressed this commitment on the back of his ‘The Musketeer’. He wrote on the backside Doménikos Theotokópoulos van Rijn Da Silva (Velázquez).

Paloma Picasso was also present at the press conference preceding the show’s opening. She confirmed this lifelong relationship. For her father, Picasso, there was no time difference. An old master from 350 years ago was as much present and a part of the dialogue as contemporaries such as Henri Mattise (1869-1954), Paul Cézanne (1839-1906) or, for example Georges Braque (1882-1963).

The relationship between El Greco and Picasso is not new. The Kunstmuseum Basel, however, presents the lifelong ‘dialogue’ in words, drawings, paintings and a catalogue. Both masters are at the centre of the attention, as if there were no centuries between them, just as Picasso saw it.

The exhibition starts appropriately with Picasso’s first drawings and their references to the old masters. Twelve works of Picasso from the Kunstmuseum Basel and around sixty masterpieces by the two artists from museums in New York, Madrid, Barcelona, London, Budapest, Washington, Paris, Toledo and Berlin present their relationship comparatively. Exceptional is the presence of masterpieces from churches in Toledo.

Picasso and Basel

Picasso has a unique, even affective relationship with Basel. Inhabitants of the city organised a referendum in 1967 to save two paintings (Two Brothers and the Seated Harlequin) for the Kunstmuseum Basel.

The owner and lender, in need of money, wanted to sell them for CHF 6 million. The population voted in a referendum with an overwhelming majority to buy ‘their two Pablo’s’. Picasso was very touched by this spirit and donated four paintings to the museum.

As part of one of the oldest public art collections in the world and in view of its capacity and commitment to organise great exhibitions and to involve the citizens of Basel, the Kunstmuseum Basel can write Yo Kunstmuseum Basel on its façade.

Anne Frank’s diary became a global phenomenon in the wake of the Holocaust. However, few people are aware of the extent to which the Frank family and the dissemination of Anne’s diary are associated with Switzerland.

Only Otto Frank, the father of Anne, survived the concentration camps. He eventually settled in Switzerland, and it was from here that he launched his quest to take the legacy of his daughter Anne to the whole world. Her diaries are a plea for more humanity and tolerance, and they have become part of world literature.

The history of Anne Frank is representative of the fate of Jewish families during World War II. The exhibition (Anne Frank und die Schweiz) interweaves the flight of Anne Frank’s family to Amsterdam from Frankfurt am Main in 1933 with the lives of the relatives in exile in Basel.

The parallel stories of the two branches of the family, and how their lives unfolded during World War II, makes the viewer keenly aware of the specific threats to Jews in two small European nation, the one occupied by Germany, the other under a permanent threat of an invasion.

The exhibition’s central theme is the diary of Anne Frank, which is presented in facsimile with displays and exhibits adding further detail to her accounts of life in hiding. It paints a picture of the conditions under which the texts were created, and examines the history of their impact and appeal. Using objects, photos and documents, the exhibition gives a glimpse into the family’s life.

The exhibition presents an authentic narrative and opens up a view of their life, also covering refugee policy and refugee assistance in Switzerland during World War II.

Plans for the Mondrian exhibition provided the impetus to set up the Piet Mondrian Conservation Project. The focus of the project, starting in 2019 and running to 2021, is on Long-term preservation of the paintings for future generations, the technical investigation of the seven paintings held by the Fondation Beyeler and the reconstruction of original framing and new design approaches to the presentation of Mondrian paintings.

The end of the project is the start of the exhibition ‘Mondrian Evolution’.  Piet Mondriaan (1872-1944) became Piet Mondrian in Paris in 1911. Marking the 150th anniversary of his birth, the Fondation devotes a comprehensive exhibition tot he Dutch painter. As one of the most significant artists of the avant garde, he decisively shaped the evolution from figuration to abstraction from the 1920’s onwards.

The exhibition is largely chronologica land shows his artistic development from a late 19th century Dutch landscape painter to his famous rectilinear arrangements of black lines and the three primary colours blue, red and yellow.

The exhibition shows, however, the straight line from the Dutch landscapes, dunes, sea, farm houses and mills to his abstraction as a process of different feelings and perceptions, between intuition and precision, trut hand beauty, the very sense of unity and the very essence of the image.

Mondrian used the term ‘evolution’ himself, as an accumulation of experiences, on which a new phase of artistic development could build, in turn leading to new and further insights.

In his earlier works he already experimented with the radiance and colours, the influence of light and the experience of space, surface, structure and reflections.

He was inspired by cubism when he stayed in Paris (1911) and he continued his investigation of themes such as abstraction. After World War I (1914-1918) many artists strove for a radical new cultural beginning. Mondrian attempted to expound his artistic programme in theoretical essays, also in the new Dutch journal De Stijl.

Mondrian named his new style ‘Neoplasticism’. He conceived it as focussing on the essential means of expression: on the hand black and white lines, on the other hand the three primary colours. The interplay of these elements gives rise to infinite possibilities of composition. The exhibition presents the major works  from his Dutch paintings to his New York time.

The fascinating short-film ‘Piet & Mondrian’ by Lars Kraume. Complements the exhibition. The film takes as its starting point his essay from 1920 ‘Natural Reality and Abstract Reality, in which the artist formulated his thoughts and considerations on abstraction art.

Mondrian spent the last 25 years of his life in Paris (1919-1938), London (1938-1940) and New York (1940-1944). He died as a famous avant garde artist and co-founder of abstract painting. He actually paved the way for abstraction after 1945.

The exhibition is part of the celebrations of 25 years of Fondation Beyeler.

The landscape is the interface between nature and culture. Every day we experience it and move within it. We find relaxation in it and associate experiences and feelings, longings and hopes with it.

We shape the landscape, dig it up, erect buildings in it, and speculate with it. This workshop exhibition traces the relationship between people and landscapes.

The exhibition shows the diversity of the landscape. In the exhibition and at selected locations in and around Schaffhausen, visitors can get involved at several research stations and a landscape laboratory. These perspectives and experiences from the research stations will be collected over the course of the exhibition to form a collective work. A large-scale video installation with recordings from the landscape laboratory will be featured in the exhibition until the beginning of July.

Climate change, pandemics, war and other conflicts, bitcoins, financial crises, the exhaustion of the earth and the explosive growth of the world’s population are causing fundamental problems and disorientation in finding solutions.

Traditional explanations are no longer applicable due to this complexity. Art reflects this situation and develops its strategies for dealing with it. More than a hundred years ago, in 1916, the Dada movement in Zurich did the same.

The Great War (1914-1918) was raging, and artists were looking for new ways to express the disorder. However, the Great War became the First World War.  The Second World War (1939-1945) was followed by many conflicts and problems for the post-war generation.

The current generation is faced with new challenges, and artists are responding to them. This exhibition (World out of Joint/Welt aus den Fugen)  in the Kunstmuseum (Beim Stadthaus) expresses this attitude strikingly.

The exhibition brings together installations by nine young international artists. The installations deal with various aspects of contemporary society.

They illustrate that traditional art can no longer answer these problems and questions. Each installation is an original cosmos, living in an interplay of time and space, of different objects and media.

The nine installations create the image of a world that has fallen apart, in which ambivalences have to be endured to interpret them. The nine installations deal with different themes but from the same perspective: depicting contemporary developments without giving answers.

Brice Malden: “Nature is a huge influence. Nature is reality. We painters deal with this weird aspect of reality. Every painting you make, you really want it to be a real thing, not just a real painting, and you’re always sort of hoping for this weird kind of apotheosis, where it all comes together”. (Source: interview Josef Helferstein with Brice Marden, Kunstmuseum Basel).

The centuries old discussion about the relationship between arts and nature summarized by a great artist.

The exhibition Brice Marden Inner Space features more than one hundred works by Brice Marden (1938) from between 1972 and 2019. The presentation includes works on paper and paintings from the artist’s own collection, some of which have never been on public display. The American artist emerged in the 1960s with monochrome paintings and drawings informed by strong emotions.

His art melded two fundamental positions in the modernist painterly tradition: Abstract Expressionism and a reduction to the essential, which lends his work at least an outward resemblance to Minimalism.

In Inner Space, the museum showcases a body of work that relates to the foci of American art after 1960 of the Öffentliche Kunstsammlung Basel (the public art collection of the City of Basel).

The monochrome panels that Marden created into the 1970s evolved a few years later into complex engagements with surface and color in diptychs and large-format multipart pictures that may be read as landscapes and architectures.

By presenting graphic series and paintings side by side, the exhibition illuminates his working methods. Its point of departure is a phase in his career whose origins lie in Basel.

The artist made a close study of the city and its culture for seven years (1978-1985) when he participated in a competition to design new windows for the apse of the Basel Cathedral. The exhibition includes selected studies for the project as well as a number of related Window Paintings.

These years proved a watershed for Marden, laying the foundation for his subsequent creative evolution. He focused on Asian calligraphy and poetry. These works mark the beginning of a new direction in Marden’s oeuvre.

In the mid-1980s, Marden began work on the Cold Mountain series, for which he took inspiration from the writings of the Chinese poet Han Shan, known as Cold Mountain, who worked during the Tang Dynasty period (618–907).

Energized color grids and convoluted lines begin to dominate Marden’s canvases and drawings, conveying a sense of motion through allusive forms. In later years, the lineaments consolidate, and color returns. A striking example is the monumental painting The Muses (1991–1993) from the Swiss Daros Collection.

The exhibition is an expanded version of Think of Them as Spaces: Brice Marden’s Drawings, February 21 – June 14, 2020 at the Menil Collection in Houston.

The Nabis group symbolises the beginnings of modern art. The group was founded by and around the artists Pierre Bonnard, Maurice Denis, Félix Vallotton and Édouard Vuillard.

The exhibition (Vivre notre temps) shows works from the famous Hahnloser/Jaeggli Collection and other paintings and reveals their connections with Paul Gauguin and Odilon Redon.

At the turn of the 20th century, art moved from figurative to abstraction. The Nabis group shows this change towards modern and abstract art, away from impressionism.

Although the Nabis artists are not connected by a unified style, technique, or development, their representations are based on the same ideas of this period and the turmoil leading up to the turn of the 20th century.

The show addresses various themes, topcis and developments relevant to these artists and reveals their multiple roots.

The exhibition Insects, du Léman au Jura (Insects, from Lake Geneva to the Jura) is part of a study of nature around Morges (canton of Vaud) and its surroundings.

Previous projects dealt with Birds (Les oiseaux, 2013) and Mammals, Amphibians and Reptiles (Les mammifères, amphibians et reptiles, 2016). The Bolle Foundation is now highlighting insects and their habitat.

The world of insects is unknown to almost everyone. We are surrounded by thousands of these small miracles, one more surprising, colourful and valuable than the other.

Insects are also an essential link in the circle of life and the development of flora and fauna. But we know so little about them. One hundred ten photos, taken by six photographers from the region, leave no one indifferent to these beautiful creatures of nature.

Who knows or has seen these animals: Psephurus gladius (Chinese paddlefish 2019), Diceros bicornis longipes (West African black rhinoceros 2011), Ectopistes migratorius (passenger or wild Pigeon 1914), Porphyrio albus (Lord Howe Swamphen 1834), Thylacinus cynocephalus (Tasmanian tiger 1936), Hydrodamalis gigas (Steller’s  sea cow 1768), Coregonus gutturosus (Lake Constance white fish 1970),  Raphus cucullatus (Dodo 1690), Lagorchestes leporides (Eastern Hare Wallaby 1890), Lipotes vexillifer (Chinese River Dolphin 2002) and Equus quagga quagga (Quagga) ?

Probably nobody. They have been extinct since 1690 and in subsequent centuries.

The installations entitled „Sleeping with the Gods“ by the artist Carlo Borer (1961) taper the milestones on the evolutionary timeline. They represent the demographic development based on models by the UN and the dramatic loss of flora and fauna.

Demographic growth

The explosive demographic growth and the extinction of animal species are the focus of this show. On the other hand, the artist is fascinated by technological advances and related developments. That is the hopeful message of the exposition by the Kulturstiftung Basel H. Geiger | KBH.G. Whether it will work this time as well, after the remarkable recovery of the Rhine or the disappearance of the Smog in London, for example, remains to be seen.

It is a well-designed and artistically powerful display of how both are related, although the issue does not often show up in the current climate discussions. Carlo Borer calls himself a builder of objects and installation art.

His Design, material and concept are based on science and industry. It also applies to this show. The underlying message is, that humankind is destroying the environment.

Digger

Destructive machines and fragments of a vulnerable planet are symbolised by his sculpture “Digger”, a construction looking like a mixture between an alien and a mining machine. It symbolises the exploitation of nature by humans and seems to take on an existence of its own that its creator cannot control anymore.

Moon landscape

Another installation shows a part of the moon landscape one-to-one but fragmented, based on data from NASA. The moon represents a dead planet (the future of the earth ?). In its shape shown here, it has disintegrated and serves science merely as a forensic research object.

Sleeping with the Gods

At the heart of the show is a large-scale installation, a timeline from the year 1700 until today. The floor represents the time about 320 years ago. Various grass-covered cones of different heights taper steadily upwards until some of them fizzle out. In the middle, a mighty, highly polished cone made of stainless steel raises up.

It represents the rapid demographic development, the grass-covered finite cones the other species that are first decimated and finally eradicated during the time of the biggest human interference with nature. The different species get a symbolic commemorative plaque in neon writing. The writing in Latin names of extinct animals is from the artist’s mother who wrote the names down.

Fibonacci

Another sculpture made of stainless steel is placed on a pile of scrap like a thin pipe or a longhorn, showing the demographic development of humankind over the past two thousand years, based on reliable data.

Humankind lived fully dependent on the rhythm of nature until industrialisation started in the eighteenth century. From this time onwards, the balance of power has changed dramatically and humankind is confronted with the consequences of human interference with nature, symbolised by the scrap.

On the scrap, the artist mentions the so-called Fibonacci numbers. These numbers represent the exponential population growth. Leonardo da Pisa or Fibonacci (c. 1170 – c. 1240) devised this series of numbers for the exponential population growth of rabbits in 1202 as written down in his book Liber Abaci.