Events

Historical events and our knowledge of them mould our understanding of today’s world. The interdisciplinary authorship of this volume focuses on the connection between past and future. A bold and unusual publication whose approaches and themes extend from biographical experiences via intergenerational exchange to the discussion of current social phenomena.

ReVisión: Art in the Americas is the first exhibition to open in the Martin Building. A strong selection of nearly 180 objects from the museum’s ancient American and Latin American art collections, hailed as one of the best in the country, will tell a visually compelling narrative about the formation of the Americas from 100 B.C. to today. The narrative will explore land, people, and place by linking ancient and contemporary artworks. These artworks address political and social issues at the heart of the America's cultural heritage and expand that narrative through voices that include women artists and ethnic minorities. ReVisión is organized by DAM curators Victoria I. Lyall, Frederick and Jan Mayer Curator of Art of the Ancient Americas, and Jorge Rivas Pérez, Frederick and Jan Mayer Curator of Latin American Art. The majority of the works on view will be from the DAM’s permanent collection, with additional loans from institutions such as the Blanton Museum of Art, and the Pérez Museum.

This show presents a selection of work by artists who address questions of diaspora from diverse perspectives, methodologies and aesthetic languages. The medium of painting, with its deep and complex history, becomes a particularly provocative lens through which to explore the complications and diversities that are analogous to the richness of diasporic experiences. This collective body of work also aims for an intergenerational dialogue and presents artists whose work has pushed the boundaries of what painting is and can be. Given the open-ended and discursive nature of the subject, the show is by no means an attempt to be exhaustive but, rather, endeavours to open up ideas and encourage dialogue.

Goddess, she-devil, doll, fetish, nymphet, or wonderful dream creature—women were the central subject matter of Surrealist male fantasies. It was often only in the role of companion or model that female artists could succeed in penetrating the circle surrounding André Breton, the founder of the group of Surrealists. However, on closer examination it becomes evident that the participation of women artists in the movement was considerably larger than is generally known or reported.

Agnes Pelton (1881–1961) was among the generation of American artists in the first decades of the twentieth century who rejected realism in favor of portraying their inner emotional states. But unlike her peers, who based their abstractions on the exterior world, Pelton used her vocabulary of curvilinear, biomorphic forms and delicate, shimmering veils of light to depict the unseen forces she believed exist in nature. Pelton’s art was included in the 1913 Armory Show, but her decision to remove herself from the art world meant that even within her lifetime she was relatively unknown except for her participation in the short-lived Transcendental Painting Group (1938–1942). Its members, like Pelton, believed in numerology, astrology, and faith healing. Agnes Pelton: Desert Transcendentalist, the first survey of her work in more than twenty-four years, brings together approximately forty paintings dating from 1917 to 1961 that will illuminate her artistic contribution to American modernism and place her art within the context of international spiritual and esoteric abstraction. Agnes Pelton: Desert Transcendentalist is organized by the Phoenix Art Museum, and curated by Gilbert Vicario, The Selig Family Chief Curator. The installation at the Whitney Museum is overseen by Barbara Haskell, curator, with Sarah Humphreville, senior curatorial assistant.

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.

The ALBERTINA Museum is devoting its spring exhibition of 2020 to one of the most important private collections of French modernist art. The Hahnloser Collection came together between 1905 and 1936, initially on the basis of close and friendly exchange between the collecting couple of Arthur and Hedy Hahnloser-Bühler and artist-friends including Pierre Bonnard, Ferdinand Hodler, Henri Matisse, and Félix Vallotton. Later on, the collection also came to include works by their predecessors including Cézanne, Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec, Van Gogh, and others. The ALBERTINA Museum’s ca. 120-work exhibition presents an overview of this internationally unique collection of modern art, with works on loan from the fine art museums Kunstmuseum Bern and Kunst Museum Winterthur additionally serving to illuminate this collection’s exemplary cultural policy aspect.

Can anyone fail to notice her? — the large Dominique who greets visitors to the Graphische Sammlung ETH Zürich with her gentle smile. The astounding portrait hanging in the corridor leading to the exhibition hall is captivating, with its inner radiance and immense sense of presence, holding the viewer suspended between fascination and bewilderment. When Franz Gertsch (b. 1930) started working on the woodcut in 1988, he was unable to decide for a long time on whether or not to use a landscape motif instead. In addition to his portraits — which in the meantime have become icons of Swiss art — the great Swiss artist is also renowned today for his enchanting landscapes. However, his early work is less familiar to the general public. This is precisely the phase of Gertsch’s extensive oeuvre on which the presentation planned in honour of his ninetieth birthday will be focusing. In parallel with the exhibition being held at the Franz Gertsch Museum in Burgdorf (“Zeitgeist Images: Franz Gertsch’s Works of the 1970s”, 21 March – 16 August 2020), the selection presented here will provide an insight into Gertsch’s early work, from a period when he was also creating romantic-seeming drawings in addition to delicate woodcuts. Individual groups of topics from his collection and from the ETH’s collection’s own holdings have been selected in collaboration with the artist. The survey will be rounded off with colour samples — affectionately termed “études (de) couleurs” by the artist — that are produced during the complex process of printing his incomparable monochrome worlds. A catalogue is planned for the exhibition. Curators: Dr. Linda Schädler and Alexandra Barcal, Graphische Sammlung ETH Zürich

In 1969, Angela Davis, a twenty-six-year-old black activist, was fired from her teaching position at UCLA, accused of involvement in a shootout that resulted in the deaths of four men, put on the FBI’s Most Wanted List, and spent several months as a fugitive. In October, she was arrested in New York and returned to California to stand trial. Her image became the focus and the tool of an unprecedented international effort to free an incarcerated black woman. Her trial and acquittal, in 1972, made her a lightning rod for fears and hopes on the right and left about revolutionary change and she has remained an active agent of change in the years since.

The voluptuous gaze upon the abysmal, the exacerbated aestheticism of a jaded society, which considered itself as being in crisis, the morbid allurement of the tension between Thanatos and Eros – all these are artistic topics that took shape in the late nineteenth century and found expression especially in Belgian Symbolism. In sharp contrast to naturalists’ and impressionists’ excitement for those facets of modernity that lie on the surface and in the ephemeral, a new artistic movement emerged in the 1880s, whose main characteristics were sensuality, fascination for magic, profound signification, as well as irrationality. Thus, symbolism can be regarded, in many aspects, as an anticipation of Freud’s theory on the interpretation of dreams, which was eventually published in 1899.