Events

George Segal (1924–2000) has been the subject of four major retrospectives and has been included in many national and international exhibitions, including the groundbreaking New Realists show at the Sidney Janis Gallery, New York (1962). While the artist has long been acknowledged as one of the most important sculptors of the twentieth century, his work as a painter, in pastels, and in photography is less well known. George Segal: Themes and Variations examines the artist’s work in all media as a series of variations on themes that he mined throughout his long career—figural groups, the nude, still life, and portraits.

In spring and summer 2024, Nationalmuseum will be hosting an exhibition on Harriet Backer who, besides Edvard Munch, was Norway’s most influential artist in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Backer was one of the most prominent colourists and portrayers of light and atmosphere in interiors. The exhibition is the result of a collaboration between the National Museum in Oslo, Kode in Bergen, Musée d’Orsay in Paris and Nationalmuseum in Stockholm. Harriet Backer (1845–1932) was a pioneer on many levels and the exhibition highlights the innovative qualities of her art, as well as her central position in the Norwegian art scene at the turn of the twentieth century. How did she become such a prominent figure in Norwegian art? Why did a whole generation of young painters, men and women alike, choose to become her pupils and successors?

The Kunsthalle München presents the first major retrospective on Dutch fashion artists Viktor&Rolf in Germany. For more than three decades, Viktor Horsting and Rolf Snoeren have been exploring with breathtaking virtuosity the boundaries between the worlds of haute couture and art. Celebrated for their unconventional approach to design, their creations have been embraced by artists such as Madonna, Tilda Swinton, Lady Gaga, Doja Cat, and Cardi B and were staged in numerous ballets, as well as in an opera directed by Robert Wilson. Reflecting the duo’s passions, obsessions and singular vision, the spectacular scenography will showcase 100 of their most daring creations—many exhibited for the first time—along with numerous videos, sketches, dolls dressed in the designers’ iconic creations, and works by renowned visual artists like Andreas Gursky and Cindy Sherman.

During the Edo period (1603–1868), feudal Japan was largely closed off from the outside world. For three hundred years, a loose movement of Japanese artists, often referred to as literati, turned to neighboring China—variably a source for emulation and a source of rivalry—for inspiration. Through painting and calligraphy, they created immersive environments in which artists and viewers alike could mentally withdraw from worldly affairs. As disparate and diverse as the literati movement was, its members were united by a common language that embraced diverse notions of “China”—a place both familiar and foreign, as much imagined as it was known. Throughout a period of modernization during the Meiji era (1868–1912) and after, when all facets of life in Japan were radically changing, China’s historic role in helping shape the fabric of Japanese history and culture remained a touchstone for Japanese artists, even in the context of imperialism and war. Imagined Neighbors presents Japanese artworks from the Mary and Cheney Cowles Collection, given to the National Museum of Asian Art between 2018 and 2022. The Cowles Collection is arguably the largest and most comprehensive group of Japanese literati works outside of Japan. The paintings and calligraphy in this exhibition fuse reality with imagination and remain important to understanding the continuing, complex engagement of Japanese artists with China, to them both a real and an imagined place.

Sonya Clark: We Are Each Other is a mid-career survey of the artist’s work with a focus on her community-centered and participatory projects. Over her twenty-five-year career, Clark has been committed to issues of history, race, and reconciliation. Clark often undertakes this exploration through everyday fiber materials—hair, flags, found fabric—and craft practices. In Clark’s work, craft and community are intertwined, and the resulting projects facilitate new collective encounters across racial, gender, and socioeconomic divisions. The ethos of her participatory work is embedded in the title We Are Each Other. It is inspired by the poem about civil rights activist Paul Robeson (1971) by Gwendolyn Brooks, which ends with the phrase: “we are each other’s harvest: we are each other’s business: we are each other’s magnitude and bond.”

In spring 2024, the Kunst Museum Winterthur celebrates the long-awaited reopening of the unique collection of Hedy and Arthur Hahnloser in Villa Flora with the exhibition Bienvenue! After ten years, the masterpieces now return to the comprehensively renovated home of the collectors in a new presentation. Featuring works from the Hahnloser Collection and a selection of loans, the presentation traces the advent of French modernism from Impressionism and Postimpressionism to the Nabis and Fauves. Alongside reputable artistic pioneers such as Vincent van Gogh and Paul Cézanne, works by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Édouard Manet, and Auguste Renoir are presented with bodies of works by the Hahnlosers’ artist friends from the circles of Pierre Bonnard, Félix Vallotton, Odilon Redon, and Henri Matisse. Sculpture is also included, with a significant selection of works by Auguste Rodin and Aristide Maillol. This exhibition celebrating the reopening of Villa Flora allows visitors to experience turn-of-the-century avant-garde art in unusual concentration and quality. It will now be possible to experience the ground-breaking Winterthur spirit for French modernism, particularly the unusual commitment of Hedy and Arthur Hahnloser, in the place where this first-class collection was created.

In 1532, Dutch artist Maarten van Heemskerck (1498–1574) embarked on a journey to Rome. From his five-year stay in the Eternal City, the Kupferstichkabinett Berlin has preserved a unique collection of around 160 drawings. These include wide panoramas and city views as well as studies of ancient ruins and sculptures. This outstanding collection will be on view in its entirety for the first time next year, 450 years after the artist's death. In addition to the virtuoso drawings, which are also important pictorial sources on the history of Rome during the Renaissance, paintings, books, prints and plaster casts will also be on display. The Kupferstichkabinett Berlin owns two spectacular adhesive albums with around 160 drawings by the Dutch artist Maarten van Heemskerck (1498–1574), which were made in Rome between 1532 and 1536/37. During these years he strolled through the city, visited art collections and antique gardens, made pilgrimages to the holy sites, and filled his sketchbook with drawings. In this way he compiled an extensive fund of motifs from which he was to draw throughout his life. After his death, the drawings were passed on, first to artists, later to collectors. Individual sheets were sold on, the majority were probably pasted into two albums in the 18th century – together with other drawings by other artists. Thus the core stock of Van Heemskerck's Roman drawings remained together until today, a unique case in art history. In 1886 and 1892, the two albums entered the holdings of the Berlin Kupferstichkabinett; since then, they have never been exhibited in their entirety.

This exhibition explores the ways in which women have shaped American landscape art. A retrospective of the accomplished American landscape painter Susie Barstow (1836-1923) is presented along with contemporary works that expand and challenge contemporary conceptions of the term “landscape.”

This multimedia examination of photographer and cinematographer Karl Struss celebrates his storied career and influence on American filmmaking during Hollywood’s Golden Age. Featuring archival materials, films, and over 100 photographs from the Carter’s extensive Struss Artist Archive, Moving Pictures: Karl Struss and the Rise of Hollywood highlights Struss’s innovations in image-making and unique contributions to the film industry in the early 20th century. Beginning when he left a successful career as a photographer in New York to start fresh in Los Angeles, Moving Pictures shines light on the innovative artistic approaches and techniques Struss brought to the world of moving pictures. Through behind-the-scenes footage, glamorous film stills and publicity images, and even Struss’s Oscar awarded for cinematography, the exhibition tells the story of how a fine-art photographer became one of the most influential cinematographers in Hollywood.

Afterglow explores Frederic Church’s elegiac use of the landscape genre in depth for the first time, centering on the exciting loans of rarely seen memorial works by Church from major private collections: To the Memory of Cole (1848) and The Evening Star (1858). By uniting the majority of Church’s memorial paintings, this exhibition unveils a little-known aspect of Olana’s legacy: Frederic Church held a reputation as a maker of memorial art, returning to the medium of landscape throughout his career to create solace in times of loss. This sequence of Church’s memorial paintings, also notably including The After Glow (1867, Olana State Historic Site), reveals an iconography of grief and remembrance related to the rising view of nature as a source of comfort, health, and spiritual well-being. The exhibition places these works in the context of the period’s material and visual culture of mourning to present new scholarship on landscape paintings as memorials in 19th-century America, focusing on the distinctive oeuvre of 19th-century America’s foremost landscape painter. At a moment of change in our national discourse around grief, as members of our community faced with loss increasingly turn to landscapes like Olana’s to find sanctuary, Afterglow considers these landscapes in a new light as spaces of remembrance and healing. By connecting the artwork of Church and his circle with contemporary concerns and practices of memorialization, this exhibition explores the significance of landscapes and the natural world in remembrance and finding peace among loss, now and in the past.

The exhibition plays with the differing perceptions of sexuality in Judaism. Modern and contemporary art, traditional artifacts, film, and new media illustrate a range of Jewish positions that have been discussed for centuries in the canon of rabbinic literature. From the central importance of marriage and procreation, via desire, taboos, and the questioning of social norms, to the eroticism of spirituality, the exhibition presents the whole spectrum of Jewish attitudes and shows that traditional debates are highly relevant to present-day Jewish positions on sexuality. The exhibition is presented in cooperation with the Jewish Museum Amsterdam.

The show combines international with regional urban art history. The exhibition begins with Brassaï and ends when Banksy's first works appeared in England. Internationally pioneering style writing and street art from 1960 onwards will be shown - with a focus on the Paris-Düsseldorf-Zurich triangle.. On display are illegally created works only. The exhibition looks at the various international developments and shows the multipliers of graffiti and street art by demonstrating the close links between pop music and street art graffiti on record covers and making this music audible. A further spotlight is placed on the connections between avant-garde art, street art and graffiti.

The exhibition project SURVIVAL IN THE 21st CENTURY explores the foundations of life in the age of the polycrisis. Developed by Georg Diez and Nicolaus Schafhausen in close cooperation with the Deichtorhallen, the exhibition incorporates elementary questions of ecology, technology and spirituality. The "School of Survival" expands the 35 international artistic positions and turns the exhibition venue into a learning space for the future. SURVIVAL IN THE 21st CENTURY focuses on fundamental questions of human existence and reflects on the radical disruptions we are facing: climate change, the digital revolution, growing injustice on a national and global scale, the crisis of democracy and the question of community. The elaborate exhibition with numerous multimedia installations and an exhibition architecture designed by Bundschuh Architekten demonstrates how cultural survival requires new cultural practices.

At the end of the 19th century the term “Secession” stood for the artistic beginnings of modernism. Art was surging forward towards freedom. Avant-garde artists showed their new creative works in the exhibitions of the Secession. In doing so they introduced innovative art movements to the public and helped Impressionism and Symbolism, for example, to achieve a breakthrough in the German-speaking region.

"The Portland Vase: Mania and Muse" asks why and how a singular Classical vase becomes a legend, an “influencer,” and an artistic and commercial muse across time and place to artists such as Josiah Wedgwood, Viola Frey, Chris Wight, Michael Eden, Nicole Cherubini, Clare Twomey and Roberto Lugo. Featuring more than sixty-five artworks, this richly illustrated catalogue examines the role of brands in our culture, considers why Classical traditions dominate the artistic canon, and how that tradition might be reconsidered and disrupted.

To this day, the desire for fame and honor inspires the imaginative powers of celebrated artists. In the blossoming baroque era around 1600 with European courts competing for prestige and wealthy burgers striving for status, it was a smart strategy for artists who wanted to make their works known and to sell them profitably, to reach out beyond local borders and to conquer far-away markets and buying audiences. Bulky sculptures and fragile paintings were little suited to such transactions. Instead, it was prints – engravings, etchings and woodcuts – that advanced to becoming perfect ambassadors on behalf of artists who endeavored to charm their audiences with graphic masterstrokes while updating them about their latest creations. Around 1600, the most successful masters in this regard were Hendrick Goltzius (1558–1617) and Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640).

"Xican–a.o.x. Body" is the first major exhibition to examine influential works by artists who foreground the Brown body as a site to explore, expand, and complicate traditional conceptions linked to Mexican, Mexican American, and Xicanx experiences. Consisting of approximately 125 artworks by about 70 artists and artist collectives, Xican–a.o.x. Body weaves a rich tapestry of diverse media, from the late 1960s through today, including Lowrider cars, poetry, pottery, painting, photography, sculpture, and film.

Samia Halaby: Eye Witness follows Samia Halaby’s (b. Jerusalem, 1936) creative journey to experiment with the ways painting conveys her experiences and reflects how she sees the world around her. Halaby’s paintings, which range from miniature to monumental, 2D to 3D, and monochrome to multicolor, are notably shaped by her experiences, and shift accordingly throughout her itinerant career across the Midwest, the East coast, and the Arab world. As a self-described painter of her time, Halaby also explores how technology can enhance and transform painting. Her experimentations thus render new approaches to capturing ephemeral moments. Halaby’s paintings reflect a life of witness, one we are invited to take part in by looking slowly and closely at the artist’s work.

"Monuments and Myths" is the exhibition to examine the intersecting careers of Augustus Saint-Gaudens and Daniel Chester French, the leading American sculptors of the Gilded Age. With rich new thinking and stunning photographs, this exhibition examines the role of America’s most iconic public sculptures in the complex negotiation of national identity.

Mark Dion and Alexis Rockman: Journey to Nature’s Underworld invites visitors on a voyage of discovery into the depths of our threatened natural world through large-scale painted and sculptural works. This exhibition is the first two-person show of these artists, who share an ongoing and urgent concern for our global environmental and ecological well-being.