April 19 – September 18, 2016
Kunstmuseum Basel | new building, 2nd floor & ground floor
Kunstmuseum Basel | Gegenwart, ground floor Curator: Bernhard
Mendes Bürgi. The three-part exhibition Painting on the Move of
2002 was held not just in the affiliated Kunstmuseum and Museum
für Gegenwartskunst but in Kunsthalle Basel, too. With its
panoply of painterly explorations of the world, it traced a vast
arc from the early twentieth century to the dawn of the new
millennium.
Conceived as a curatorial counterpart, Sculpture on the Move is
to focus on sculpture from the end of the Second World War to
the present. This major exhibition to mark the inauguration of
Kunstmuseum Basel’s new building will visualize the
extraordinary dynamism underlying sculpture’s development,
revealing how the classical notions defining it came unstuck,
how it ventured beyond the representation of visible reality and
became abstract, how it took on the banality of the everyday
object, and how even after breaking out of its spatial and
conceptual confines it regrouped to revisit the figurative. The
selection of works from Kunstmuseum Basel’s own collection,
flanked by important loans from international museums and
private collections, promises an exhibition of exceptional
density and diversity.
The exhibition will begin with some late works of the great
Constantin Brancusi and Alberto Giacometti in the top-lit
galleries on the second floor of the new building designed by
the architects Christ & Gantenbein. The loosely chronological
sequence that follows will highlight various aspects of the
medium between the 1940s and 1970s, as exemplified by the works
of Alexander Calder, Jean Arp, Max Bill, Henry Moore, Louise
Bourgeois, Pablo Picasso, Eduardo Chillida, David Smith, Jean
Tinguely, Claes Oldenburg, Duane Hanson, John Chamberlain,
Donald Judd, Carl Andre, Joseph Beuys, Mario Merz, Bruce Nauman,
Eva Hesse, Richard Serra, and Robert Smithson.
The continuation of the tour on the ground floor of the new
building will focus on sculpture of the 1980s with works by
Peter Fischli and David Weiss, Robert Gober, Charles Ray, Mike
Kelley, Jeff Koons, Katharina Fritsch, and Franz West, among
others. The third part of the exhibition in the Kunstmuseum
Basel | Gegenwart will bring us up to the present with important
positions of the past three decades, including sculptures by
Gabriel Orozco, Matthew Barney, Absalon, Damien Hirst, Danh Vo,
Monika Sosnowska, and Oscar Tuazon.
www.kunstmuseumbasel.ch
Floorplans