Agenda

The exhibition Freiheit | Auftrag (Freedom, Commission) focuses on a multi-faceted artistic personality whose oeuvre counts among the highest expressions of art in the first half of the 20th century.

The exhibition travels along the “Freedom” and “Commission” issues to explore the relationship between free creation and commissioned art. It reveals the tension within which Augusto Giacometti (1877-1947) spent his productive life as an artist.

Currently, the Bündner Kunstmuseum Chur is showing an exposition dedicated to the artist’s works on paper.

(See also a painting of Augusto Giacometti in the Flowers for Art in the Aargauer Kunsthaus)

Augusto Giacometti (1877-1947) was one of the most important Swiss artists of the early 20th century. Born in Stampa in Bergell (canton Graubünden), he studied in Zurich and Paris and spent years in Florence before settling in Zurich.

Through his training in Paris, he became involved in Art Nouveau. He turned sketches of plants and animals into ornamental works and regular repetitions of the same elements.

These formed the basis for his pastel drawings, in which light and colour were the central means of expression. He was a pioneer who also translated the experience of transparent glass windows and the brightness of butterfly wings into his art.

From the beginning, drawings and works on paper were among his primary means of artistic expression. Here, he developed his visual language between figuration and abstraction. The exhibition focuses on his works on paper and thus shows the foundations of this oeuvre.

The Aargauer Kunstmuseum simultaneously shows the exhibition Augusto Giacometto. Freiheit und Auftrag.

Hamed Abdalla (1917-1985) is a pioneer of Egyptian modernism. The Zentrum Paul Klee dedicates a presentation to his work in the series FOKUS. FOKUS shows particular aspects of Paul Klee’s work or contributions to the global reception of this artist within the permanent exhibition Kosmos Klee.

Abdalla was born in Egypt. His origins, mainly the villages and landscapes of the Nubian region and Cairo, were motifs at the beginning of his career. From the 1950s, Abdalla lived in Copenhagen and Paris, but he continued to refer in his works to the political situation in his homeland.

As an artist of the Hurufiyya movement, which explored new artistic possibilities of the Arabic alphabet, Abdalla developed his own “creative words”: he translated Arabic words into colours, bringing together abstraction and human figuration, the secular and the sacred, and the poetic and the political. Abdalla also experimented with different techniques and materials.

He also studied European modernism, especially Paul Klee and how Klee incorporated non-European visual languages such as Egyptian hieroglyphics into his art. Abdalla looked at Klee from a new perspective by identifying and highlighting those elements in which the Bauhaus artist had appropriated non-European motifs.

With around 50 works, the exhibition showcases these and several other focal points from Abdalla’s oeuvre.

Five thousand years ago, a new material, bronze, revolutionised the world. The exhibition “And then came bronze!” shows the fascinating era in which highly efficient tools and weapons were mass-produced for the first time and in which war became an established means of conflict resolution.

The exhibition also features the Bronze Hand of Prêles, a sensational archaeological find discovered in the Bernese Jura in 2017. The hand is the oldest bronze replica of a human body part in Europe.

The acquisition of raw materials for bronze production led to an unprecedented network of trade relations between the Near East, Egypt and Europe. The global world of the Bronze Age was marked by innovation and progress, but also by social inequality and violence. Powerful elites and hierarchies emerged.

A special highlight is the Bronze Festival on the weekend of 22 and 23 June, when the museum offers a wide range of activities. From 16 October to 27 November, experts will discuss topics relating to bronze and the Bronze Age.

The exhibition Margrit Linck. Pioneer of Ceramics (Margrit Linck. Pionierin der Keramik) presents the entire oeuvre of the Berner ceramicist Margrit Linck (1897-1983) for the first time.

With her creativity, the artist balanced between applied and free art. Her constant exploration of form, expression and technique gave new impulses to the craft and made her a ceramics pioneer.

Her repertoire includes animal-human metamorphoses between vases and sculptures, figures painted with bold brushstrokes and freely hand-constructed bodies.

Besides many of her objects from more than half a century, drawings and photographs testify to a varied creative life and a great passion for her trade and craft.

In video interviews, other artists discuss their collaborations and experiences with Margrit Linck. In addition, a film installation gives an insight into Linck Keramik current studio in Worblaufen near Bern.

Using an extensive collection of old samples and work plans, around five employees in the studio still produce utility ceramics based on designs by Margrit Linck. The factory also develops new ceramics.

Today, Iwan Baan (1975) is considered one of the most influential photographers of architecture and the environment. He documents the growth of global metropolises and traditional buildings. Over the last 30 years, digital media have fundamentally changed the world of photography and architecture.

Impression of the exhibition. Photo: TES

Hardly any other photographer has characterised this development as strongly as Iwan Baan. His working method is fast and precise, and he creates images that are concise, poetic and human at the same time. Baan knows how to capture buildings perfectly but also catches the moments when architecture comes to life, when construction workers take a break and when people move in or out of their houses.

The exhibition (Iwan Baan. Moments in Architecture) presents a panorama of early 21st-century architecture in its urban and social contexts and the people who live in it with the photographer’s wide-ranging work.

The Foundation La Maison de la Rivière presents the work of the naturalist painter Jacques Rime in a retrospective exhibition (Quand Jacques Rime avec nature) featuring more than 60 drawings, paintings and engravings by the artist.

With his art, this colleague of Robert Hainard bears witness to the beauty of our habitat. In 2018, the Foundation La Maison de la Rivière organised a major exhibition dedicated to Robert Hainard, one of the prominent artists of nature of our time.

See also: La Fondation Hainard

The exhibition Rembrandt et la Bible. Gravure divine is a collaboration between the Musée d’art et d’histoire (MAH) and the Musée International de la Réforme (MIR). A total of 72 works are brought together for the first time.

This group represents many of the 89 religious scenes engraved by the painter. Of the 314 prints Rembrandt made, 89 have a religious theme.

In addition to Biblical episodes, there are portraits of St Jerome, several Virgins with child, depictions of the Holy Family, the death of the Virgin and a portrait of women reading the Bible. The exhibition shows several variations of the same theme.

The exhibition design considers the medium Rembrandt used and is inspired by his studio in Amsterdam. The exhibition follows the chronology of the Bible, with texts from the Old and New Testament near the works, allowing visitors to see which episodes from the Bible Rembrandt selected and how he treated them.

His Biblical episodes are varied, and the realism of the characters can be interpreted as a desire to involve everyone in the events of the sacred story.

Rembrandt immortalised his family, neighbours and the people he encountered in 17th-century Amsterdam as models for his depictions. Because most of the engravings are small, the scenography unfolds by creating numerous enlargements of details.

The exhibition is divided into five rooms, including the religious context in Amsterdam, followed by a room combining biographical, historical and artistic chronologies, a printing press to print the details of the Rembrandt engravings on display, and a film explaining the etching technique used by the artist.

Italian drawings from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century are the focus of the exhibition Disegno disegni. More than 100 sheets from a private collection are highlighted for this occasion, in dialogue with the museum’s collection.

Pieces from the Renaissance to the 19th century take visitors through Italy’s major artistic centres, from Venice to Rome, via Bologna and Florence.

Artists in these cities used diverse techniques and materials when creating their drawings. Religious and secular subjects, study pages and simple sketches show the versatility of the medium and its functions.

To complement the exhibition Disegno disegni, the Pavillon de l’estampe presents a selection of engravings made in Italy between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries.

The exhibition From Raphael to Piranesi ( De Raphaël à Piranèse) highlights the role of prints in the spread of Italian models, from the many reproductions modelled on Raphael to Piranesi’s famous series of prints. It shows various techniques and subjects that have interested printmakers over the years.

The Iberians are subject of a major archaeological exhibition in Basel. The Antikenmuseum Basel and Sammlung Ludwig, in cooperation with the Museu d’Arqueologia de Catalunya in Barcelona, presents more than 260 exhibits from 40 archaeological excavation sites that illustrate the diversity and beauty of these peoples who lived along the eastern part of the Iberian Peninsula during the Iron Age (800-100 BC).

Pictures: Exhibition ‘Iberians’, Antikenmuseum Basel and Sammlung Ludwig

The exhibition offers a fascinating insight into the history of the Iberian peoples. The Iberian culture began to develop in the 6th century BC. The era of the Iberians came to an end around 500 years later when the entire Iberian Peninsula was conquered by the Romans.

The Iberian peoples lived on the southern coast of Andalusia from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mediterranean Sea, as well as across the entire eastern coast of what is now Spain, also extending as far as Languedoc in what is now southern France.

They achieved a high level of social and cultural development. The Iberian culture developed from the combination of local traditions and foreign influences from the Orient and Greece. Drawn to the region by the plentiful metals, the Phoenicians, and later the Greeks, established trading settlements in the areas populated by the Iberians.

The Iberian culture was characterised by highly developed production techniques, for example gold and silversmithing methods, as well as a spoken and written language, a complex system of gods and religious practices.

Its civilisation was already mentioned by ancient Greek and Roman scholars, but  forgotten after the fall of the Roman Empire (5th century AD). Archaeological excavations and historical, linguistic and paleogenetic studies allow a reconstruction of this splendid Iron Age culture.

The exhibition texts are available in Catalan, Spanish, German, English and French.