Events

With a retrospective exhibition, the Sammlung Goetz will honor the artist Imi Knoebel, who developed his own minimalist and conceptual formal vocabulary. The entire breadth of Knoebel’s artistic output—from the black-and-white photographs of the 1960s to the fiberboard paintings and objects made of cast concrete and finally his most recent acrylic paintings on aluminum—will be on view. The presentation includes not only the artist’s geometric and minimalist works, but also his rarely exhibited expressive paintings from the 1980s.

The theme of the exhibition is the turbulent history of LGBTQ* in the first half of the twentieth century. Selected exhibits show how queer life became increasingly visible in all areas of the public sphere from 1900 onwards — in art and culture, science, politics, and the military. However, as the movement gained confidence in its campaign for equal rights, so too did the strength of the resistance to it, culminating in the almost total destruction of queer subcultures and the spaces they occupied by the Nazi regime. “TO BE SEEN” invites visitors to revisit these often forgotten stories and biographies. Alongside historical testimony, the exhibition will also show works by contemporary artists, some of them commissioned especially for the exhibition. They question the standard historical narratives and place them in new international perspectives. Artists: Katharina Aigner, Maximiliane Baumgartner, Cassils, Zackary Drucker, Philipp Gufler, Lena Rosa Händle, Zoltán Lesi, Ricardo Portilho, Henrik Olesen, Karol Radziszewski and others.

“Kinship” presents more than forty artworks by eight contemporary artists whose work explores the notion of “kinship” and the closeness that bonds us. The exhibition spotlights artists Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Ruth Leonela Buentello, Jess T. Dugan, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Jessica Todd Harper, Thomas Holton, Sedrick Huckaby, and Anna Tsouhlarakis. Featuring contemporary portraits in various mediums, “Kinship” explores the ways intergenerational dynamics change in response to physical and symbolic thresholds and borders, including those between life and death; childhood and adulthood; normative gender roles; and geographic regions. The upcoming exhibition will visualize the complex, often paradoxical, and deeply moving ways in which interpersonal relationships endure and change. “Kinship” is the latest in the museum’s “Portraiture Now” series dedicated to contemporary artists and is curated by the Portrait Gallery’s curators Dorothy Moss and Leslie Ureña with Robyn Asleson, Taína Caragol, and Charlotte Ickes. The exhibition will have an accompanying catalogue. Two live performances by artist Anna Tsouhlarakis will take place as part of the exhibition in May and Nov. 2023 in the museum’s Kogod Courtyard. Admission is free.

Around 1700, artists in Udaipur (a court in northwest India) began creating immersive paintings that conveyed the mood (bhava) of the city’s palaces, lakes, and mountains. These large paintings and their emphasis on lived experience have never been the focus of an exhibition. With dazzling paintings on paper and cloth—many on public view for the first time—A Splendid Land reveals how artists conveyed emotions, depicted places, celebrated water resources, and fostered personal bonds over some two hundred years in the rapidly changing political and cultural landscapes of early modern South Asia. The exhibition is organized as a journey that begins at Udaipur’s center and continues outward: first to the city, then to the countryside, and finally to the cosmos. A soundscape by the renowned filmmaker Amit Dutta invites contemporary audiences to sense–and not just see—the moods of these extraordinary places and paintings. A Splendid Land: Paintings from Royal Udaipur will also be on view at the Cleveland Museum of Art in Summer 2023.

The MdbK will present Olga Costa's diverse oeuvre in a comprehensive exhibition for the first time in Europe. In addition to works from over 50 years of the artist's career, outstanding positions of Mexican modernism, such as Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, María Izquierdo, Rosa Rolanda or Lola Cueto, will also be on display.In Mexico, the Leipzig-born artist Olga Costa (1913-1993) has long since established herself as one of the most important female voices of modernism. In the 1920s, her family emigrated to Mexico, where Costa became self-taught in her new environment. Throughout her life, she was fascinated by the colours of the Latin American landscape, the scenes of everyday life, the indigenous culture and, last but not least, the people themselves. In her paintings, drawings and graphics, Olga Costa combines an independent, modern vocabulary with subtle undertones of content. From a specifically female perspective, her works humorously and thoughtfully always reflect on themes such as freedom, belonging, cultural identity and gender roles.

Analivia Cordeiro has been exploring the relationship between body, movement, visual and audiovisual art, and media art since the early 1970s. Her seminal work »M3x3« from 1973 is considered the first video artwork in South America and internationally one of the first dance choreographies conceived for video and by means of computer notations.  The exhibition, curated by Claudia Giannetti, presents for the first time in Europe an overview of the complete works of the Brazilian artist, dancer and choreographer. In addition to her early video performances and computer dances from 1973 to 1976, selected works from 1980 to the present will be shown, which as video projection, interactive installation, drawings, sculptures and app make it possible to experience the artist's extensive repertoire. 

C.C. Wang (1907–2003) is best known as a preeminent twentieth-century connoisseur and collector of pre-modern Chinese art, a reputation that often overshadows his own art. The exhibition recenters Wang’s extraordinary career on his own artistic practice to reveal an original quest for tradition and innovation in the global twentieth century.

Who inspired Gustav Klimt, the great master of Viennese Modernism? How familiar was he with Vincent van Gogh? Had he ever seen a work by Henri Matisse? The collaborative exhibition between the Belvedere in Vienna and the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam follows a trail that starts with Klimt’s artistic forerunners and leads to his contemporaries. In striking juxtaposition, the show displays works by Klimt, Van Gogh, Matisse, and many others. Curated by Markus Fellinger (Belvedere, Vienna), Edwin Becker (Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam) and Renske Suijver (Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam).

The exhibition is a retrospective of the two renowned Russian-American artists Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid, who worked together as a duo from the late 1960s through 2004. Komar and Melamid emerged from the circle of Soviet nonconformist artists who rejected the Soviet government’s dictate that limited artists to the propaganda-based style of Socialist Realism. Komar and Melamid were among the founders of Sots Art, a style that employed a provocative and ironic manner to expose the absurdities of the official art and the regime as a whole. A paraphrase of American Pop Art’s reaction to the overproduction of consumer goods, Sots Art was a reaction to the overproduction of ideology that rendered Communist slogans and symbols nonsensical.

His pictures look curious, his figures introverted and his street scenes strangely stage-like. Jacobus Vrel records everyday life in Holland during the 17th century, and creates quirky worlds at the same time. This volume presents the fascinating complete œuvre of a painter whose works were thought during the 19th century to have been painted by Vermeer.

Marc Chagall is regarded as the poet among the artists of modernism. In a major exhibition, the museum sheds light on a so far little-known side of his oeuvre: Chagall’s works of the 1930s and 1940s, in which the artist’s colorful palette becomes darker. The life and work of the Jewish painter were profoundly affected by the art policies of the National Socialists and the Holocaust. By the early 1930s, Chagall’s works were already examining the increasingly aggressive anti-Semitism in Europe, and he finally emigrated to the United States in 1941. During these years, his art works touch on central themes such as identity, homeland, and exile.

Funk You Too! connects the historic Funk Art movement to contemporary ceramic practice through the exploration of the enduring role of irony, absurdity, and a tongue-in-cheek approach to image-making with clay. The founding generation of Funk artists used forms of humour such as irony and satire to deflate the power of the aesthetic hierarchy that dismissed ceramics as hobby art.