Agenda

The exhibition is dedicated to Le Corbusier’s (1887-1965) handling of colour. He used colour as a spatially formative, iconic element in every phase of his career.

The exhibition retraces the development of his polychromy with photographs, originals, plans, and large-format installations.

These are supplemented by three large-format installations that offer visitors a deeply sensual experience of colour. Polychromy.

Le Corbusier made colour an integral part of his architectural concept and developed what he called “colour keyboards” or claviers de couleurs to match.

Le Corbusier explained the theoretical underpinning of his “Purist”  polychromy in his legendary Zurich lecture of 1938. Colour took on a new significance in his work after World War II.

Henceforth it would serve him as a means of animating large surfaces, becoming, in the broadest sense, an ornament. The architect began using bolder hues in conjunction with untreated materials such as concrete, brick, and wood.

He further broadened the scope of polychromy in architecture by exploring the color of light, whether by means of coloured glass, as in the chapel at Ronchamp (1955), or by projecting coloured light into an interior, as in the Philips Pavilion for Expo 58 in Brussels.

The lower level of the Pavillon retraces the creative use of colour in his oeuvre and the various phases it went through. It starts with his first experiments in La Chaux-de-Fonds and the famous villas of the 1920s and moves on to the large developments of later years such as the Unité d’habitation in Marseille.

Bruce Conner (1933-2008) is legendary for his view of the art world and his reputation as the father of the video clip. He worked in a wide range of media. This exhibition focuses on nine of his experimental films, among these a Movie, Report, Mea Culpa, Crossroads, Monologo and  Looking for Mushrooms are on show.

Stefan Zweig (1881 – 1942) was a successful author a collector of literary manuscripts.

He managed to amass an eclectic range of texts that reflect his keen interest in the diversity of European literature, a collection of several hundred autograph texts by the authors he most admired.

This trove includes rough drafts of famous or unpublished works, preparatory notes, personal letters, even manuscripts meant for the printers, from Renaissance writers up to his contemporaries.

Forced into exile in 1934, Zweig chose to part with his collection and turned to the Viennese bookseller Heinrich Hinterberger, with whom he organized the sale of the manuscripts from London.

The greater part of the collection was acquired by the Swiss bibliophile Martin Bodmer (1899 – 1971) The characteristic unity of the Zweig collection was thus largely preserved.

The exhibition (De Stefan Zweig à Martin Bodmer)  offers the opportunity to see some of the finest pages of the world’s literary heritage.

The food on the plate shapes the perceptions of who we are – proving that, as the saying goes, “you are what you eat”.

The exhibition “Fleisch” looks at the processes behind this phenomenon, following meat from the table back via the butcher’s shop to the slaughterhouse and the farm. What is in the meat,  where does it come from, and where lies its future ?

Against the backdrop of climate change and the debate over animal rights, choosing between a sausage and grilled cheese has turned into a question of identity.

The exhibition examines our relationship to meat and investigates the role of a substance that is at once living entity, commodity and gourmet temptation. This multimedia presentation is all about the inner life of carnivores and vegans.

Olafur Eliasson (1967) invites us to explore future forms of coexistence by welcoming multiple perspectives. For his show, the artist immerses the institution in a border-crossing investigation of our preconceptions of nature and culture.

The plants in Life–dwarf water lilies, shell flowers, water ferns, and more –were carefully selected, exploring the perforated lines between nature and culture, acknowledging that we humans are part of larger systems.

The topic of two exhibitions at two museums in Basel focuses on the humans and how they shape the world they inhabit.

The focus at the Museum of Ethnography (26.01.2021 – 23.01.2022) is on the following themes: relationships, orientation, traces, and imaginations. Old European masters, African masks, Asian shadow plays along with an orator’s stool from Oceania tell about the multitude and variability of relationships.

The exhibits reflect relations of humans amongst each other, with the animal world, as well as with ancestors who, in turn, exert influence on human life.

Mobility, both mental and physical, has always been an issue for humans. Wherever people travel, live and work, they leave traces in the landscape.

A series of artworks not only depict cultural landscapes but also scenes of industrialization and environmental degradation.

Large paintings and textiles from across the world show how humans immerse themselves in imaginary, surreal or cubist worlds, forests, and cities and render them artistically.

The exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Basel (27.11.2021–24.4.2022, Making the World. Spiritual Worlds) centres on the human spirit and how it lends meaning to the world through belief and religious imagery.

On the occasion of the anniversary of 50 years of voting rights for women in Switzerland, the museum presents female costumes and accessories from the period from 1600 to the present day.

The exhibition (Robes Politiques. Frauen Macht Mode)  is theme-based in approach, without chronological ordering. The clothing of influential women is examined in six chapters from various viewpoints.

Fifty textile objects illustrate the tension between femininity and a position of power, between scandal and idealisation, between populism and representation, demonstrating how clothing is deployed for strategic purposes. The specific examples from various centuries and countries reveal continuous elements, developments and changes.

The search for precision in time measurement has been a driving force behind innovations in the watch industry since the 17th century.

The pendulum, the balance spring and then the quartz make it possible to multiply the precision of clocks. From the Second World War onwards, the precise measurement of time passed from the hands of watchmakers and astronomers to those of physicists.

From 1967, the measurement is determined by a microscopic phenomenon: the oscillation of caesium atoms. One femtosecond – 0000 0000 0000 0001 seconds is measurable.

This precision, hidden to ordinary people, is essential to the organisation of today’s human society: geolocation, navigation, transport, telecommunications, possible thanks to the extreme precision of the time measurement.

The exhibition “proud walls” thematizes the relationship of Richard Wagner to architecture.

The exhibition is based on the recently published book ” M. Kiesel, Chr. Bührle, J. Mildner, Proud Walls – Wagner Sites in Zurich, Lucerne, Tribschen and Venice, Regensburg 2020″ (Prachtgemäuer – Wagner-Orte in Zürich, Luzern, Tribschen und Venedig).

For the first time, all of Richard Wagner’s residences are described in detail. In the Hotel Schweizerhof in Lucerne in 1859 Wagner completed his work Tristan.

He lived in nearby Tribschen from 1866 to 1872 in today’s Richard Wagner Museum.

His place of residence in Zurich is also illuminated with a view to Wagner’s development in the history of music.

Venice inspired the composer in a special way, but the city was his place of death as well.

The museum presents the topics of fairy tales, myths, legends, fables and sagas, which form a fundamentally important part of every culture and its collective memory.

The exhibition pursues themes that course through the narratives of people from different cultures. These themes start deep in prehistory and spread at an early stage.

They unfold in the myths, sagas, fables, legends of antiquity and lead into the world of the European fairy tales, which were initially handed down only orally.

The world of Liechtenstein sagas is also showcased. The influence of these literary genres has shaped art for millennia.

The narrative elements and narrative structures passed down in the stories can also be found in the modern world of fantasy narratives and films.