Agenda

Catherine Meurisse (1980) is one of today’s most famous female French comics artists. She is the author of several graphic novels and comics reportages, drew caricatures and illustrated children’s books.

Catherine Meurisse became the first cartoonist and caricaturist to be made a member of France’s Académie des Beaux-Arts.

The retrospective is the first in the German-speaking world to show original drawings from all works by this multi-award-winning artist.

She also publishes in newspapers and magazines. She became the first female cartoonist to work at Charlie Hebdo, narrowly escaping the 2015 attack.

She has released two graphic novels with autobiographical elements: La Légèreté (The Lightness) and Les Grands Espaces (The Great Outdoors).

In 2014, the comedy “Moderne Olympia” (Olympia in Love)was published, linking paintings and objects from the collection of Musée d’Orsay with a story from the world of painting, dance and early film. In 2019, Catherine Meurisse managed to represent Alexandre Dumas’s memories of Eugène Delacroix in her publication Delacroix.

As the result of two stays in Kyoto, she produced “La jeune femme et la mer” (The Young Woman and the Sea), in which she addresses her perception of the Japanese landscape, nature and way of life.

Raphael Ritz (1829-1894) was long considered an artist who mainly focused on the past and his canton (Valais), in contrast to his famous namesake, the hotelier César Ritz (1850-1918).

Raphael Ritz’s career between Valais and Düsseldorf, his writings and his work, however, bear witness to a cosmopolitan artist.

The exhibition (Raphael Ritz. Aujourd´hui/Heute) sheds new light on the work of this artist. Moreover, the exhibition is complemented by a selection of contemporary photographs by some ten photographers, including Laurence Bonvin, Nicolas Faure, Yann Gross and Corinne Vionnet.

The accompanying sound exhibition Raphaëlle / Raffaela by Sabine Zaalene (1969) is a female echo of the work of Raphael Ritz.

Since ancient times, people have stored ice in ice chests, basements or other storage facilities.

In the 20th century, new were machines were invented, such as the refrigerator.

The exhibition (partly taken from the Cité des Sciences in Paris) shows the many facets of cold, both natural and manufactured.

A second section looks at the strategies that living things, plants, animals and humans, use to protect themselves from extreme temperatures, both cold and heat.

Animals matter human beings. People cannot imagine life without them. This relationship is varied and ambivalent.

Animals were domesticated over many thousands of years, and today they are members of our families. Human beings seek out the company of animals, both living and in other forms.

In the relationship with animals, humans continue to adopt the role of master, however. We use them for work, transport, and in wartime. In a farmhouse setting. Milking stools, tail clamps for cows, and beehives point to animals as sources of nutrition.

The tables are turned when animals and deities in animal form take precedence over human beings. The latter enter into a special compact with the former who are worshipped by them.

“ animalistic! One Theme – Four Exhibitions ” is a joint project by four Basel museums: Museum der Kulturen Basel, Historisches Museum Basel – Musikmuseum, Antikenmuseum Basel und Sammlung Ludwig, and Pharmaziemuseum Basel: tierischbasel.ch.

The exhibition (animalistic! Animals and hybrid creatures in Antiquity) delves into the world of wild animals and ferocious hybrid creatures that have always fired the imagination.

The show presents the status of animals in ancient civilisations and encounters monstrous creatures such as centaurs, griffins, the sphinx and the Chimera.

Many of these hybrid creatures originated in the Middle East and Egypt. In Greek culture, they were a symbol of a strange, dangerous and chaotic world, against which the Greek heroes on their adventures in foreign lands had to prevail.

The exhibition is a Cooperation between four Basel museums: Museum der Kulturen Basel, Antikenmuseum Basel, Pharmaziemuseum der Universität Basel and Historisches Museum Basel (see also Swiss Spectator, Animalistic! One Theme-Four Exhibitions, Events, 20 October 2021, and www.tierischbasel.ch).

Francis Alÿs  (1959) not only reimagines the city, he also creates narratives, spreads rumors and maps the social fabric of the city.

This show presents an overview of the artist’s video work of the last thirty years, with an emphasis on one of the central themes in Francis Alÿs’s practice, namely walking.

In these videos, shot in a number of countries, the imaginary spaces of childhood blend with the fictional spaces of the artist, offering him an entry point when dealing with unknown situations or contexts. In his projects, the artist reveals the deeply subversive potential of play and fiction, while making it possible, short of refashioning reality, to imagine and see it differently.

The city is the material of his art. Over the years, he extended his works to Havana,  London, Venice, Kabul, Jerusalem and other places, reimagining each city through his itineraries.

The exhibition (Lyonel Feininger – La ville et la mer) presents the graphic work of the artist Lyonel Feininger (1871-1956) on the occasion of his 150th birthday. Lyonel Feininger, born in the United States, made a career in Germany and became an important figure in the European avant-garde.

Printmaking was an important phase in his career. Between 1918 and 1922 he devoted himself to the intense production of woodcuts. This technique deepened Feininger’s formal and conceptual research, allowing him to return to painting and drawing. In 1919 he participated in the founding of the Bauhaus movement in Germany.

The exhibition presents a rich selection of etchings, xylographies and lithographs, as well as drawings, archival documents and previously unseen objects from private collections.

The exhibition and the accompanying book portray the (forensic) work of the interdisciplinary research team.

It gives surprising insights into the fate and life of Anna Bischoff (1719-1787) and everyday life in Basel and Strasbourg in the eighteenth century. The team also reconstructed her clothes and the most likely cause of her death.

The search for the ancestors of Anna Catharina Bischoff also revealed astonishing facts. Anna is the great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandmother of Boris Johnson (1964), the current UK Prime Minister.

Gerhard Hotz, Claudia Opitz-Blakhal (Eds.) Anna Catharina Bischoff. Die Mumie aus der Barfüsserkirche, Rekonstruktion einer Basler Frauenbiografie des 18. Jahrhunderts. Christoph Merian Verlag, Basel, 2021).

The museum is presenting, in collaboration with the Menil Collection in Houston and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the first major transatlantic retrospective devoted to Meret Oppenheim.

It includes some 200 key works on paper, objects, sculptures and paintings, and among other things it gives a glimpse of the largest museum portfolio of works by the artist in the world, which is held by the Kunstmuseum Bern. Bern is the first stop of the exhibition and the only one in Europe.

Francisco de Goya (1746–1828) was one of the last great court artists and the first forerunner of modern art. He was both a painter of impressive portraits and an inventor of enigmatic, highly personal pictorial worlds.

Spanning more than 60 years, Goya’s career covers a period ranging from Rococo to Romanticism. He depicted saints and criminals, witches and demons, pushing open the gate to realms in which the boundaries between reality and fantasy become blurred. In his art, Goya shows himself a keen observer of the drama unfolding between reason and irrationality, dreams and nightmares.

The exhibition brings together around 70 paintings and more than 100 masterful drawings and prints. For the first time, seldom seen paintings from  private collections are shown alongside key works from European and American museums and private collections.

The exhibition is accompanied by a new film by Philippe Parreno (1964) The artist devotes his new work to Goya’s long-destroyed country house and its legendary murals, the Pinturas negras (Black paintings). This installation illustrates Goya’s enduring influence on subsequent generations of artists from Picasso to Warhol to the present day.