Agenda

The Foundation Pierre Gianadda presents more than 100 works by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901). Many of them are on show in Europe for the first time.

Johann Peter Flück (1902–1954) was on of the best Swiss portrait painters of his time. The exhibitions shows around 40 works of his most successful period, the 1940’s and 1950’s. His Passion of Jezus is also famous and is dispalyed as well.

The young British woman Jemima Morrell and three other women of their Alpine Club climbed the highest mountains in France and Switzerland in 1863. Jemima wrote a diary that was only rediscovered in 1963. The exhibition tells the story of this remarkable enterprise of four your women. As one of the first package tourists, they discovered Switzerland and the Alps in 1863. The exhibition also shows the beginning of the mountain enthusiasm.

The exhibition  imparts background information to the panorama of Thun in four sections. The main protagonist and creator of the panorama, Marquard Wocher, is presented in the first place. Who was he, who undertook the painting of the first cyclorama of Switzerland? Where and how was the panorama of Thun created and what is the meaning of the term “panorama”? Playfully and diversely the exhibition illuminates the background story of the oldest surviving cyclorama in the world. Pictures, sketches, notes, objects and digital reconstructions guide the visitors through the various rooms.

Around 1900, painter and lithographer Anton Reckziegel (1865-1936) shaped the image of Switzerland as a tourist destination. The castle of Spiez hosts an exhibition dedicated to his work, complemented by impressions from present-day artists. The exhibition is organized in cooperation with the Swiss Alpine Museum (Alpines Museum der Schweiz).

The exhibition turns the spotlight on the rich collection of the museum, presenting world-famous works as well as rarely-seen treasures in new contexts. The display is set out before a backdrop of events in the history of Basel that are brought into focus by this art. The show is organized around selected moments in Basel’s varied history of ideas and everyday practices and the lives of individuals associated with the city: the humanist Erasmus of Rotterdam, the painting The Dead Christ in the Tomb by Hans Holbein the Younger, the illustrator and naturalist Maria Sibylla Merian, the historian and art historian Jacob Burckhardt, the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, the 1912 Basel Peace Congress, the figure skaters Frick and Frack, the inventor of LSD Albert Hofmann, and the women’s rights activist Iris von Roten.

According to the Chinese lunar calendar, the New Year begins this year on 16 February. Colourful prints featuring tutelary deities and divinities of good fortune play an important part in the festivities. Printed on ordinary paper, these prints were essentially religious supplies, some were pinned up on doors to ward off evil spirits and left there for the remainder of the year, while others were set up on an altar and later ceremoniously burned. The more than ninety prints, the majority of them collected around 1926, originated from different print shops in northern and southern China. They reflect the diversity of Chinese folk art, granting viewers a charming glimpse of the lives and beliefs among China’s general population. The German photographer Michael Wolf created a fascinating series of photographs showing small, humble shrines devoted to the earth god, which stand on nearly every street corner in Hong Kong. A selection of photographs bearing witness to this living tradition is also on show in the exhibition.

The Oberaar Glacier at the headwaters of the Aare River is one of the key glaciers whose runoff feeds the complex hydropower system built by Kraftwerke Oberhasli. The complex maintains 9 power plants nowadays. They were built in 7 construction phases from the 1930’s through 1979. Hydroelectric power is Switzerland’s most important source of energy and it is the energy resource of the future as well. In the twentieth century, entire Alpine valleys were dammed and flooded in order to produce hydroelectricity. The construction of the dams was both a major event and a public attraction. The exhibition examines how artists and photographers have represented the massive Grimsel-Oberaar hydroelectric dam in the Bernese Alps. The main focus is on the wood engraver, painter, and draughtsman Emil Zbinden (1908-1991), who spent several summer weeks at the Alpine construction site between 1950 and 1953.  In the exhibition, Zbinden’s works will be juxtaposed with photographs taken by Heinz Bysäth, Anita Niesz, Jakob Tuggener, and Hans Tschirren.

In einer grossen Retrospektive würdigen das Fotomuseum und die Fotostiftung Schweiz gemeinsam den Schweizer Künstler Balthasar Burkhard (1944–2010). Burkhards Schaffenszeit umspannt ein halbes Jahrhundert: Von seinen fotografischen Anfängen in der Ausbildung bis zu seinem internationalen Durchbruch als Fotokünstler, der die Fotografie als monumentales „Tableau“ in die zeitgenössische Kunst überführte. An über 150 Werken und Werkgruppen spürt die Ausstellung der künstlerischen Selbsterfindung eines Fotografen nach.

The museum for Photography (Fotomuseum) will showcase in cooperation with the Fotostiftung the oeuvre of the Swiss artist Balthasar Burkhard (1944–2010) in a major retrospective. Burkhard’s work spans half a century: from his early days as a trainee photographer to his role in chronicling the art of his time, eventually becoming a photographic artist in his own right who brought photography into the realms of contemporary art in the form of the monumental tableau. More than 150 works and groups of works chart the progress of his own photographic career and the emergence of photography as an art form. An exhibition in collaboration with Museum Folkwang (Essen) and Museo d’arte della Svizzera italiana (Lugano).