Agenda

“Ulysses”, written by the Irish exile James Joyce (1882-1941) in Trieste, Zurich and Paris, is considered one of the most influential novels of the 20th century.

Exactly 100 years after its first publication on 2 February 1922, the exhibition portrays the genesis, the reception, the content and form of “Ulysses” in a hundred objects, documents and photographs.

They are the story of the publication, the criticism and scandals that followed it. The author told the story of three people on an ordinary day in Dublin in the early summer of 1904, creating a multifaceted portrait of the city.

He broke with the prevailing conventions and used poetic language and stylistic diversity, a Marcel Proust avant la lettre.

Switzerland is often described as a perfect country: breath-taking scenery, sparkling clean cities and highly efficient infrastructure. The Swiss only know about those things from the news. Political upheavals happen elsewhere, and humanitarian involvement and “good deeds” are part of Switzerland’s self-image. A little paradise in the middle of Europe.

On closer inspection, contradictions emerge. So what is it, an idyllic paradise, or a staid backwater of provincial attitudes? A nation open to the world and all it holds, or a stronghold of conservativism?

This question isn’t so easy to answer. It depends not only on the perspective but also on who’s answering. In addition, there are often a number of facets that may be diametrically opposed. Switzerland is full of bewildering contrasts.

The exhibition Wunderbar widersprüchlich  (Amazingly ambivalent) examines some of the views held by insiders, and those on the outside, and uncovers contradictory aspects of Switzerland. It aims to encourage visitors to self-reflect and their relationship with Switzerland.

Jenny Holzer (1950), one of the leading contemporary artists of her generation, has curated an exhibition of the work of Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010), widely regarded as one of the most important and influential artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Holzer is internationally renowned for her exploration and subversion of public language through the use of nontraditional forms. Bourgeois’s psychologically charged work deals with the realm of human emotion: love, desire, dependency, sexuality, rejection, jealousy, and abandonment.

The exhibition presents an encounter between two giants of American art, Bourgeois’s work as seen through Holzer’s eyes.

Holzer approaches Bourgeois’s art through the lens of her extensive writing. Works from all stages of Bourgeois’s oeuvre — sculptures, installations, paintings, drawings, prints, and texts — have been selected to create a series of thematic groupings.

The title of the exhibition (Party for Öyvind) quotes an invitation sent out by Patty and Claes Oldenburg, who in 1967 threw a party to celebrate Öyvind Fahlström’s birthday in New York.

Öyvind Fahlström (1928-1976) studied art history and archaeology in Stockholm and Rome. On moving to Rome in 1952 he immersed himself in the local art scene

In 1961 he travelled to the USA on a stipend together with his wife and collaborator, Barbro Östlihn. The couple’s first friends in New York were Patty and Claes Oldenburg. Fahlström, moreover, was able to take over Robert Rauschenberg’s studio and he , he experienced the rise of Pop Art and happenings at first hand. He stayed on in the city up to his death.  Öyvind met Tinguely in 1955 when the latter came to Stockholm for his first solo show in Sweden.

The exhibition shows the major works and the (artistic) life of the artist.

The exhibition Japan. Arts and Life presents one hundred and seventy works from the Montgomery Collection, one of the largest and best known collections of Japanese art outside Japan.

The collection takes in artworks dating from the 12th to the 20th century, including textiles, furniture, paintings, religious and everyday objects – carefully selected from the over one thousand objects collected over a lifetime by Jeffrey Montgomery.

Renowned worldwide, the collection displays an extraordinary richness and a very singular substance: it is a collection of ‘oriental art’, and at the same time it expressed a “folk culture” reinterpreted in very elevated aesthetic terms by the elegant and refined choices made by the collector who had dedicated his entire life to it.

According to common belief, Islam has an absolute ban on images and is hostile to pictorial representations, quite in contrast to Christianity. But is this actually true? Are images categorically forbidden in Islam? And what about Christianity: doesn’t the Second Commandment state “thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image”?

The exhibition In the name of the Image. Imagery and between Cult and Prohibition in Islam and Christianity (Im Namen des Bildes. Das Bild zwischen Kult und Verbot in Islam und Christentum) deals with such questions on a comparative, cross-cultural basis. It traces the strategies Islam and Christianity applied over the centuries to deal with aniconism.

The focus is on the Middle Ages, that is, the period from the 6th to the 16th century. During this time, the question of images was debated extensively by theologians. The 136 works on display cover a geographic area that stretches from Latin Western Europe (Kingdom of France and Holy Roman Empire) to the eastern Mediterranean (Byzantine Empire and later Ottoman Empire) to Western Asia (Persia) and as far as South Asia (Mughal Empire in India).

Complementary to the exhibition, the museum is organizing a series of lectures to address certain aspects in more depth, and in which we get to hear what world-renowned experts have to say on the subject.

With a major retrospective on Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986), the Fondation is dedicating the exhibition to one of the most significant artists of the 20th century and an outstanding figure in modern American art.

From O’Keeffe’s earliest abstractions to her iconic depictions of flowers and landscapes of the American Southwest, the retrospective will offer an in-depth survey of the artist’s work including rarely seen paintings from public and private collections.

The exhibition examines her particular way of looking at her surroundings and translating them into new and hitherto unseen images of reality.

The exhibition aims to focus the attention on the topicality of O’Keeffe’s bold and radical way of looking. Spanning more than six decades, it is the first major retrospective in Basel and the first comprehensive overview of her oeuvre in Switzerland for almost 20 years.

In the newly designed Sculpture Hall, the museum presents its new collection of Greek sculptures from the Archaic, Classical and Hellenistic periods and Roman marble copies of famous Greek works, which give an overview of the development of ancient Greek development sculpture.

One focus is the idealised body of the 5th and 4th centuries BC, made according to rules of proportion and beauty.

Gods and goddesses, athletic heroes and maenads are depicted alongside poets and philosophers, rulers and other historical figures, whose funerary reliefs testify to their social position at the time.

The figures and reliefs are made of precious materials such as marble or bronze. Today, these cultural testimonies still delight us with their timeless aesthetics and brilliant sculptural achievements.

Henry Brandt (1921-1998) was a self-taught exponent of the cinematic and photographic arts. Together with Alain Tanner and Claude Goretta in particular, he was one of the co-founders of the Swiss Filmmakers Association (ARF/FDS) in 1962.

He produced a large number of films during an active professional career that spanned some 35 years. His documentaries for the Swiss National Exposition in Lausanne in 1964 made a lasting impression on an entire generation of visitors and filmmakers.

Various events in other cities underline the quality of his work and his ability to grasp the major issues of the society of his time: education, ageing, pollution, nature, the consumer society, the Cold War and arms race and the contrast between poor and rich countries. Themes that are still relevant today.

(Further information: www.henrybrandt.ch).

The retrospective of Jean Dubuffet (1901-1985) offers a new perspective on the work of this pioneer of “Art Brut”.

Although he paradoxically rejected the established art culture, movements and techniques, his work occupies an essential place in the artistic landscape of the second half of the 20th century.

The diversity of this exhibition testifies to his inexhaustible creativity. With more than ten thousand works included in the catalogue raisonné, Jean Dubuffet’s polymorphic work covers six decades of the 20th century.

The exhibition shows his most famous paintings and works on paper (drawings and gouaches).