Events

"The Art of Orientation" explores the mosque through 125 artefacts from across the Islamic world. It employs an original and contemporary approach by incorporating essays by leading Arab and international authors, which provide a fresh interpretation of the cultural history behind the shown objects by interweaving concepts, histories and ideas.

With its multitude of startling new artistic styles, Modernism has remained a source of inspiration for successive generations of later artists. It paved the way for the liberation of perspective, proportion, and colour from formal verisimilitude. This living legacy is vividly reflected in the new display of modern art from our own collection, now presented in relation to 80 contemporary works from the Goetz Collection. The joint display leads to a broadening of artistic media, away from the traditional collection core of paintings to include photography, sculpture, and textile art. Many of the more recent artists also take a critical look at this legacy of Western culture and question how art, then and now, deals with the body, gender, and identity. The show features the art of Francis Bacon, Max Beckmann, Louise Bourgeois, Fischli Weiss, Rodney Graham, Wassily Kandinsky, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Franz Marc, Pablo Picasso, Oskar Schlemmer, Rosemarie Trockel, Woty Werner, Andrea Zittel, and many more.

Marking the 500th anniversary of the Spanish conqueror Hernán Cortés' landfall in the Gulf of Mexico, this major exhibition offers a fascinating insight into Aztec culture. At the centre of the exhibition are two unique feather shields and a nephrite jade figurine from the Württemberg State Museum, objects that have never been presented in the context of Aztec culture. These exquisite treasures will be complemented by high-quality objects loaned from Mexican and European institutions. Another focal point of this exhibition will be the presentation of the latest research results; for example, previously undisclosed findings regarding the great temple, the Templo Mayor, first discovered in 1978, will be on display. Impressive stone sculptures, ceramics, mosaics and gold works will provide a glimpse into Aztec art and culture, with vivid illustrations from colourful illuminated manuscripts bringing the visitor deeper into the subject. The dramaturgy of the exhibition follows the journey of Cortés from the peripheral provinces all the way to the sacred ceremonial precinct of the capital, Tenochtitlán.

Elina Brotherus (*1972 in Helsinki) is internationally known for her self-portraits. And the fact is that she herself may be seen in almost all of her photographic and video works. These include series resembling diaries, photographed landscapes and situational mood-pictures. The exhibition at the Weserburg directs attention to more recent works and groups of works created since 2016. Here the Finnish artist appropriates various contemporary concepts of art and integrates them into her own unmistakeable aesthetic. She thereby follows Arthur Køpcke’s motto: ‘People ask: Why? I ask: Why not?’ A masterly lightness and an absurd humour give rise to surprising pictorial inventions with which Brotherus engages in a fresh exploration of the possibilities offered by photography.

Senga Nengudi: Topologies is composed of more than 70 abstract and conceptual artworks by the internationally recognized artist, a prominent figure of the 1970s Black American avant-garde and Black Arts Movement.

Taking Shape: Abstraction from the Arab World, 1950s–1980s traces the emergence and development of abstraction in the Arab world through paintings and sculpture dating from the 1950s through the 1980s. Drawn from the collection of the Barjeel Art Foundation, it will feature some sixty works by a diverse group of artists from across the Middle East and North Africa.

Starting from Helmar Lerski’s outstanding photo series Metamorphose – Verwandlungen durch Licht (Metamorphosis through Light) (1935/36), the exhibition Faces presents portraits from the period of the Weimar Republic. The 1920s and ’30s saw photographers radically renew the conventional understanding of the classic portrait: their aim was no longer to represent an individual’s personality; instead, they conceived of the face as material to be staged according to their own ideas. In this, the photographed face became a locus for dealing with avant-garde aesthetic ideas as well as interwar-period social developments. And it was thus that modernist experiments, the relationship between individual and general type, feminist roll-playing, and political ideologies collided in—and thereby expanded—the general understanding of portrait photography.

Beautiful and expressive art? Or images of racial thinking and oppression? This spring’s major exhibition at SMK tells a lesser-known, darker story about the two famous artists Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880–1938) and Emil Nolde (1867–1956). Two giants of modern art Kirchner and Nolde are both prominent figures within modern visual art. As painters, they played an important role in the Expressionist movement which quickly shot to fame in the early twentieth century, becoming known for its bold colours and strong, energetic brushstrokes.

With this major retrospective of the work of British sculptor Phyllida Barlow (* 1944), Haus der Kunst 2021 opens a series of exhibitions in the museum’s East Wing dedicated to contemporary female voices. Phyllida Barlow‘s sculptural structures are unwieldy and difficult to take in: timber, cardboard, cement, clay, plastic pipes, and colorful textiles pile up, spread out, or block the visitors’ way. The view ranges over these landscapes made of everyday materials, unsure what to hold on to, and drifts up to grasp their enormous dimensions. Barlow‘s works pose a constant challenge; they conquer the space as if they led a life of their own. They invite viewers to reconsidering spaces, perceive volume, and hear the language of architecture.

Nearly seventy of the finest examples of Asian art in the United States, collected by John D. Rockeller 3rd and his wife Blanchette Hooker Rockefeller between the 1940s and '70s, will be showcased in an exhibition on loan from the Asia Society Museum. The extraordinary range of bronzes, ceramics, and metalwork reveals great achievements in Asian art spanning more than two millennia.