This section contains an overview of the most relevant exhibitions in Switzerland and neighbouring regions. Each item is connected to the organizing museum.
The exhibition is all about electricity and its impact on the region. The starting point and important thematic focus is the first large hydroelectric power station in Europe, built in Rheinfelden in the 19th century.
Starting from the Rheinfelden power station, the two Swiss engineers Agostino Nizzola (1869-1961) and Charles E.L. Brown (1863-1924) laid the foundation for a network of electricity supply that today spans the globe.
The exhibition (Napoleons Ende: St. Helena, Arenenberg und die Geburt einer Legende) is dedicated to the life and death of Napoleon (1769-1821) in exile on St. Helena.
One of the highlights is the bed in which Napoleon is said to have died. The sarcophagus also contains many of the relics of the former French emperor.
His stepdaughter and sister-in-law Queen (of Holland) Hortense de Beauharnais (1783-1837) already presented them to her visitors at the Arenenberg in specially equipped display cabinets. She also used them to introduce herself and her son Louis Napoléon (1808-1873) in their Thurgau exile as Napoleon’s rightful heirs.
A unique feature of the exhibition is the installation of the Napoleon grave in the castle park. In 1821/22, Hortense and Napoleon’s confidant Gaspard Gourgaud (1783-1852) planted a willow called “Saule de Sainte-Hélène” in the western park of the palace, in imitation of the original grave on St. Helena.
It is no ordinary willow but a “Babylonian willow”. There are many indications that there was also a stone tomb under the Arenenberg tree. For the special exhibition, an installation will visualise the tomb copy.
Another room is dedicated to the relationship between Napoleon and Lake Constance. Although he never visited this site, his decisions continue to impact the region to this day.
The exhibition is part of an international project by the Fondation Napoleon (https://fondationnapoleon.org).
Camille Pissarro (1830–1903) ranks among the most distinguished artists of nineteenth-century France. A central figure in Impressionism, he exerted considerable influence over the movement’s evolution. The exhibition is the artist’s first retrospective in Switzerland in over six decades. It combines a comprehensive survey of Pissarro’s oeuvre with a spotlight on his collaborative practice and his key role in paving the way for modernism.
The exhibition pays tribute to an artist whose achievements are too often overshadowed in histories of the art of the nineteenth century by those of his more prominent colleagues.
The presentation sheds light on Pissarro’s sustained exchanges of ideas and contextualizes his diverse oeuvre with works by Claude Monet, Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Georges Seurat, Paul Signac, Mary Cassatt, and others.
From 4 September to 1 November 2021, the works of the artist Armando Losa (1936-2016) will be on display in the Sinopia rooms of the Museo Casa Rusca.
The project is part of a series of exhibitions that the museum is dedicating to essential personalities of the Locarno art scene. More than 30 works, including paintings and drawings, offer the opportunity to explore his painterly oeuvre from the late 1960s to 2012.
A characteristic and particular trait of the artist is his relationship with nature. The exhibition’s themes are primarily visions and memories of natural elements and places experienced, from the region’s mountains to the details of a plant, to stylisations that lead to the most extreme geometrisation.
This permanent exhibition features both everyday objects and works of art and presents Swiss history from the Revolution to the Belle Époque. Spread over two floors, it explores issues of political and economic, social and cultural history.
It shows how the poor, agricultural nation that was Switzerland under the Ancien Régime transformed itself within six short generations into a modern, industrialised state. There is also information on the fascinating developments in medicine between the 18th and early 20th centuries, including the discovery of vaccines, the birth of dentistry and the invention of anaesthetics.
Other interesting topics include tourism, schools and school hygiene, emigration, middle-class life, the working world, the tools of a modern economy: telephones, dictaphones and calculators, railways and access to products from elsewhere (19th century).
The British cartoonist, comics artist and children’s book author Posy Simmonds (1945) has attracted attention internationally with the three graphic novels Gemma Bovery (1999), Tamara Drewe (2007) and Cassandra Darke (2018).
She fascinates with precise psychological portraits, mocks the shortcomings of the middle class and cultural scene, caricatures staidness, and criticises social developments.
Relatively long text passages alternate with traditional comic sequences, while references to classics by writers such as Gustave Flaubert and Charles Dickens add further layers to the stories.
An elegant, clear and corporeal drawing style, profoundly developed characters, unerring humour and the alert mind of a great storyteller characterise all of Posy Simmonds’s works.
The exhibition (Posy Simmons Close Up) presents the most comprehensive retrospective on this major British artist yet seen in Switzerland, with original drawings from all graphic novels and from her children’s books, as well as illustrations and cartoons for newspapers and magazines, plus unpublished preliminary work.
It is also the first-ever exhibition of originals by Posy Simmonds in the German-speaking world.
Cornices are everywhere. Windows, doors, ceilings, mirrors, wall panelling from across the centuries sport elaborate profiles at their edges. Cars and clothes, furniture and household objects feature their own cornice-like elements. Strips, bands and lines of paint act like cornices by framing or crowning almost any kind of artefact.
Still, cornices hide in plain sight. They attract far less attention from architects, critics or theoreticians than, for instance, columns or architectural orders.
In response, the exhibition focuses on the many incarnations of the cornice in art and architecture. To reveal these histories and uncover the complex role of the cornice in architecture, urbanism and art, the exhibition will unite a unique selection of over 150 drawings, prints, books and objects from the 15th century to the present day. Authors and artists exhibited include Francesco di Giorgio, Gottfried Semper, Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier.
Meister GA mit der Fussangel (um 1538 tätig), Korinthischer Sims mit Akanthusblättern verzierte Konsole, 1530 – 1540, Kupferstich, Graphische Sammlung ETH Zürich.
Antigone is complemented by a small collection of works by Tacita Dean (1965) that closely relate to this film, as well as a recent large-scale blackboard drawing, Chalk Fall (2018) and slate works, which include a recent drawing, Cynthia Teeming—Cynthia being a full moon.
The exhibition continues with an installation of a group of short 16mm films shown together for the first time: Ear on a Worm (2017), A Cloud makes itself (2020), Un providence (2018) and LA Magic Hour (2019-2021).
The Museum hosts the Swiss premiere of Antigone (2018), Tacita Dean’s (b. 1965) most complex work to date.
The presentation of the hourlong, anamorphic 35mm film is contextualized by other films, photographs, photogravures, and chalk drawings of the British-European artist.
Antigone revolves around the name ‘Antigone’ and how it resonates, not only in Greek literary history, but also in the artist’s own life.
Antigone is the name of Dean’s older sister so was one of the first words the artist ever learnt. ‘Antigone’ is also the eponymous heroine in the Theban trilogy of plays by the Greek tragedian Sophocles, which led Dean to intertwine her own story with the mythological cosmic order of classical antiquity.
The central concern in Antigone is blindness: the artist’s own willed blindness and action are prismatically fractured, yielding a panoply of radiant images.
The artist has dedicated herself in the last decade to reusing some of the early visionary techniques of filmmaking that created cinema as we know it and reworking them as a powerful argument for the medium
The screening of Antigone is complemented by a small collection of works by Dean that closely relate to this film, as well as a recent large-scale blackboard drawing, Chalk Fall (2018) and slate works
The exhibition continues with an installation of a group of short 16mm films: Ear on a Worm (2017), A Cloud makes itself (2020), Providence (2018) and LA Magic Hour (2019-2021).
The exhibition shows the most beautiful coloured lithographs, gouaches and representations of the large nature reserve between Säntis and the Rhine Falls at the time of its tourist discovery in the early 19th century.
A cooperation project (Idyllen zwischen Berg und See) of the Rosgartenmuseum Konstanz with the Swiss museums Turmhof Steckborn, Volkskundemuseum Stein, Museum Appenzell, Museum Rosenegg, Museum zu Allerheiligen Schaffhausen, Historisches und Völkerkundemuseum St. Gallen, Museum Herisau, vorarlbergmuseum Bregenz and renowned private collectors.