Events

Invented in Munich in 1796, the new printmaking medium of lithography introduced a simpler, faster, and more economical means of producing all types of printed matter. This exhibition of more than 120 works, almost exclusively chosen from the Zimmerli Art Museum’s rich collection of nineteenth-century French graphic arts, presents a survey of French lithography from its establishment in Paris around 1815 through the end of the nineteenth century. By the 1820s, Paris had emerged as a major center of artistic lithography as the medium was taken up by both established and rising artists, including Horace Vernet, Nicolas Charlet, Théodore Géricault, and Eugène Delacroix. Their example inspired an ongoing development of the creation and production of lithographs by French artists, printers, and publishers which culminated in the 1890s with large color lithographic posters by such artists as Jules Chéret and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. The exhibition is funded in part by Ruth Schimmel, the Estate of Arline DuBrow, and donors to the Zimmerli’s Major Exhibition Fund: James and Kathrin Bergin, Alvin and Joyce Glasgold, Charles and Caryl Sills, the Voorhees Family Endowment, and the Jerome A. Yavitz Charitable Foundation, Inc.–Stephen Cypen, President. Organized by Christine Giviskos, Curator of Prints, Drawings, and European Art

Contraption: Rediscovering California Jewish Artists is a group show that presents the work of sixteen California-identified artists of Jewish descent—both historical and living—whose work refers to the machine either literally or metaphorically. Some of the artists are rarely seen now. Among the living artists, there will be large-scale mechanical installations by Bernie Lubell and Sheri Simons, as well as ceramics, drawings, sculpture and paintings by Ned Kahn, Bella Feldman, Howard Fried, and Annabeth Rosen.

From March 2018 to September 2019, the Bowl of the BMW Museum will be dedicated to a wide range of subjects, including electric mobility, carbon, battery technology and renewable raw materials. A themed area of around 30 stations will demonstrate the diversity of electric mobility, various aspects of sustainable material selection and production, as well as some of the challenges facing emission-free mobility in the future. As part of continuing technological developments, the first approaches to solving these problems have already been implemented successfully. The task now is to make further advancements in digitalisation that would allow for fully autonomous driving. The BMW i brand stands for visionary mobility and vehicle concepts. It implements innovations and thereby contributes pioneering work within the enterprise. The brand’s drive is electric, its values sustainable and its design progressive. The BMW Museum is honouring the achievements of the brand that first set new standards with the BMW i3 and the BMW i8 and revolutionised individual mobility in large cities through a variety of mobility services. But it did not stop there: BMW i launched countless new, independent business areas within the enterprise, and has been aiming for new horizons and taking on new challenges since the beginning of 2018. Once again, the brand is carrying out pioneering work and is ready to realise new innovations.

In the spring of 2018 the Hamburger Kunsthalle is mounting Germany's first large-scale monographic exhibition on the English painter Thomas Gainsborough (1727–1788), concentrating on his role as a pioneer of ›modern‹ landscape painting. Curated by the director of the Hamburger Kunsthalle, Christoph Martin Vogtherr, the show features some 80 exhibits, comprising around 40 paintings and 40 works on paper. Thomas Gainsborough, born in Sudbury, grew up in Suffolk in south-eastern England, and the landscape there would leave a lasting mark on his art. He trained with French-influenced artists in London and undertook close studies of Netherlandish landscape painting. His art thus springs from a broad grounding in European art. Gainsborough experienced his breakthrough after moving to the fahionable spa town of Bath, where he became highly successful as a society portraitist. He later worked in London and was a founding member of the Royal Academy. Gainsborough much preferred painting landscapes to portraits. They provided a far better field for experimentation with highly innovative media and techniques, allowing him to continuously to develop his style. The artist picked up on the wave of experimentation that swept England in the eighteenth century, eventually elevating it to the standing of Europe’s leading economic and political force. At the same time, Gainsborough's contribution helped to transform his country into a prime European centre for art.

At the focus of the first exhibition jointly conceived by aut and the Archiv für Baukunst stands the Munich-based photographer, architect and designer Klaus Kinold (b. 1939), who has been documenting postwar modernism in Germany for many decades. The creative accomplishments of Hans Döllgast (1891–1974) and Rudolf Schwarz (1897–1961) occupy a central role in his work. Fascinated by their materially restrained architecture that is strongly oriented to the space as well as the atmosphere, Klaus Kinold devoted himself from the early 1980s on out of empathy for these “master builders of the other modernism,” who—contrary to the representatives of so-called “radical modernism”—followed a restrained and, in a certain sense, conservative approach.

Hero to a generation of younger artists, Joan Jonas is a pioneer of performance and video who has pushed the boundaries of art for the last five decades. Experience the largest exhibition of Jonas’s work ever held in the UK. Early works from the late 1960s are shown alongside recent installations dealing with topical themes such as climate change and extinction. You can see her landmark installations including Organic Honey, The Juniper Tree and Reanimation. For the first time at Tate Modern, a single artist’s work is explored in the exhibition galleries, and in film screenings in the Starr Cinema and installations in the Tanks – an experimental exhibition for an experimental artist. Joan Jonas will also perform live alongside other artists as part of the BMW Tate Live Exhibition: Ten Days Six Nights programme. Organised by Tate Modern and Haus der Kunst, Munich​​​​​​​

Gustav Klimt is probably the artist most associated with Austrian art. His death in 1918 – the same year as the deaths of Egon Schiele, Koloman Moser, and Otto Wagner – is seen as the end of an era. However, their influence on the art world had waned even before this. Only peripherally affected by the political turmoil, a vibrant art scene developed in the countries of the Austro-Hungarian Empire with artists striving for change. The exhibition at the Lower Belvedere will guide you through this post-Klimt era. The interwar years are characterized by the wish for international connections that transcended new political and ideological boundaries. There was a vibrant exchange of ideas between artists resulting in constructivist, expressionist, and fantastical trends. Cosmopolitan networks emerged among the artists of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire while art magazines made an increasingly important contribution to disseminating these new ideas. The outbreak of the Second World War brought this internationalism to an abrupt end and the sense of a shared culture faded, once again, into the background. The exhibition seeks to reveal the parallels during this period and demonstrate continuity and change in the art of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and its successor nation states. Featuring works by around eighty artists including Josef Capek, Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, Albin Egger-Lienz, Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka, Koloman Moser, Antonin Prochaska, Egon Schiele, Lajos Tihanyi, and many more.

For around two-and-a-half thousand years, gold coins were an important part of the monetary systems of nearly all states, and gold continues to play an important role as a reserve asset to this today. Weighing in at 3,374 tonnes, Germany’s gold reserves are the second largest worldwide, after those of the United States. The Bundesbank is responsible for managing these treasures, and this special exhibition is the first time a selection of the most remarkable gold bars will be put on display to the general public. Among them is one of the oldest bars held as part of Germany's reserve assets, which was cast in 1917 and delivered to the Bundesbank’s predecessor – the Bank deutscher Länder – by the Federal Reserve Bank in 1956. A combination of exhibits and extensive information materials invites visitors to learn how monetary and foreign exchange policy have evolved over time. The numismatic part of the exhibition is centred around a range of particularly important and long-lived historical gold coins from the Bundesbank’s very own numismatic collection. One highlight for visitors is the longest-lived coin in the world – the ducat – which was introduced in 1284 and is still being minted to this day. Coins such as these did much to shape the international world of payments in their day and played a prominent role in monetary and foreign exchange policy. In many cases, they influenced coin minting in other countries. On the occasion of the special exhibition on April 11, 2018, there will be an international symposium on the subject of gold at the Money Museum. Interested parties are invited to participate. Further information can be found here.

Landscapes after Ruskin: Redefining the Sublime explores contemporary painting, photography, sculpture, and video through the lens of influential English art critic and social thinker John Ruskin (1819–1900), who argued that the artist’s principal responsibility is “truth to nature.” For Ruskin, this “truth” was more than just a technical representation of the natural world on canvas but also a depiction of it as experienced by humankind. In Landscapes after Ruskin, guest curator and artist Joel Sternfeld examines how, in a world overwhelmed by industrial development and environmental uncertainty, contemporary artists are discovering new beauties and terrors associated with nature and, in so doing, invoking an updated sense of the sublime. The exhibition features a wide range of works by over fifty artists, including Richard Artschwager, Christiane Baumgartner, Katherine Bradford, Spencer Finch, Neil Jenney, Raymond Pettibon, Michal Rovner, Ai Weiwei, and David Wojnarowicz, among others. Organized by the Hall Art Foundation, the exhibition will be accompanied by an illustrated catalogue.

In the second part of the exhibition Gurlitt: Status Report, the Kunstmuseum Bern is again mounting a selection of works from the Gurlitt “art trove.” This selection comprises pieces that were seized by the Nazis in their persecution campaigns as well as artworks whose provenance and circumstances of acquisition still can not be conclusively ascertained today. Nazi Art Theft and its Consequences traces the Nazi looting of European Jews and elucidates the role of art dealers and museums in the expropriation campaigns of the regime. Hildebrand Gurlitt was involved in forced sales and dealt with artworks that were either stolen or confiscated from museums as “degenerate art.” The works bequeathed provide a direct link to the biographies of his contemporaries who were persecuted by the Nazis. Most of the former owners were Jewish artists, collectors, and art dealers. The exhibition devotes a separate section to the “restitution” of looted art from the Gurlitt “art trove.” An exhibition of the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn augmented by the Kunstmuseum Bern. Curator: Nikola Doll

“We don’t know the contour of feeling; we only know what molds it from without.” – Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926), Fourth Duino Elegy Celebrated as one of the most influential sculptors working today, Ursula von Rydingsvard is best known for her large-scale works and signature use of cedar wood. Her sculptures’ abstract shapes reference the mark of the human hand—evidence of the artist’s meticulous process of cutting, shaping, and assembling her works from thousands of cedar blocks—while simultaneously evoking the grandeur and power of nature. Guest curated by Mark Rosenthal, Ursula von Rydingsvard: The Contour of Feeling focuses on von Rydingsvard’s artistic development since 2000 and her continued commitment to experimentation throughout her career. Alongside a survey of recent works, the inclusion of select early sculptures will provide insight into the artist’s longstanding material and thematic interests. Featuring approximately 20 works—over half of which are large scale—the exhibition includes many sculptures never before exhibited in the United States. The Contour of Feeling will also mark the debut of a new large-scale sculpture created in collaboration with The Fabric Workshop and Museum specifically for the exhibition. Constructed from leather—a first for the artist—the piece’s scale is in keeping with recent work, while the new material represents an expansion for von Rydingsvard’s practice. It will mark the second collaboration between the artist and FWM, the first being in 1989 when she created a new work from felt. By spotlighting her more recent work and contrasting it with earlier pieces, Ursula von Rydingsvard: The Contour of Feeling highlights the artist’s evolution and presents a window into a unique synthesis of emotional fragility and imposing scale in her work that marks von Rydingsvard as an extraordinary artist of our time.

Hello World. Revising a Collection is a critical inquiry into the collection of the Nationalgalerie and its predominantly Western focus: What could the collection look like today, had an understanding characterised its concept of art, and consequently also its genesis, that was more open to the world? How might the canon and the art historical narratives themselves have changed? With these questions as starting points, the exhibition unfolds in more than ten thematic chapters as a many-voiced collaboration of internal and external curators, encompassing the whole exhibition space of the Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart – Berlin. Hello World places the focus on transnational artistic networks and cross-cultural entanglements from the late 19th century to the present. The exhibition presents over 120 paintings, sculptures, installations, videos and films by some 80 artists, chosen from the collection of the Nationalgalerie. These provide points of departure for an exploration into hidden stories and new perspectives on the collection and its history. Such stories include Heinrich Vogeler’s path to the Soviet Union, Dadaist Tomoyoshi Murayama’s sojourn in Berlin in the 1920s, and the collaborations between Nicolás García Uriburu and Joseph Beuys. To do so, Hello World also incorporates works drawn from the collections of the Ethnologisches Museum, the Museum für Asiatische Kunst, the Kupferstichkabinett, and the Kunstbibliothek (all also of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin), as well as the Staatsbibliothek Berlin and international loans.

Towards Impressionism traces the development of French landscape painting from the schools of Barbizon and Honfleur up to Impressionism, featuring over forty works from the extraordinary collection of the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Reims. Selections from the Frye Art Museum’s own holdings will be incorporated into the show, making this a unique opportunity to situate masterpieces from the collection within their original context. The Reims museum has one of the world’s foremost collections of landscape paintings by artists associated with the Barbizon colony—artists like Théodore Rousseau, Charles-François Daubigny, Jean-François Millet, and Constant Troyon who gathered in the village of Barbizon between 1830 and 1855 to paint in and around the nearby Forest of Fontainebleau. Fascinated by the mysteries of the forest and rural tradition, the Barbizon artists rejected urban life and the teachings of the French Academy. Where previously landscape had served only as backdrop for allegorical or historical tableaux, the Barbizonists painted landscape for its own sake, working from observation but often infusing their subjects with an emotionality reminiscent of Romanticism.