Kubin's eerie, unsettling illustrations reveal his preoccupation with the world's evils
For Austrian artist Alfred Kubin (1877-1959), evil was intrinsic to his life and work. After a traumatic childhood growing up in Zell am See and subsequent mental crises, he began his artistic training in Munich in 1898. He processed his nightmares and obsessions in a large number of fantastical drawings. His subjects, perpetually pessimistic, remain relevant a century later: war, famine, pestilence, death and every horror in between. Kubin had a pronounced fear of the feminine, sexuality, night time and of being at the mercy of fate, all of which visited him in uncanny dreams. For Kubin, the aesthetic of evil proved to be the antithesis of the idyll: the deliberate suppression of a hideous reality.
Drawn from the Albertina Museum's collection of over 1,800 drawings by the artist, The Aesthetic of Evil displays Kubin's grotesque vision as well as his superb draftsmanship. Amid the violent, haunting atmosphere of his graphic works it is easy to see how Kubin became trapped in his dark visions, to the point where the inexhaustible, intangible specter of evil consumed his life. Essays by Elisabeth Dutz, Natalie Lettner and Brigitte Holzinger explore Kubin's cosmos of the sinister: his personal iconography of evil fueled by his nightmares and obsessions.
Fondation Beyeler's invitation to the voyage through the oeuvre of one of the moste famous modernist artists - from his early paintings to his legendary late silhouettes.
Henri Matisse is one of the most celebrated artists of Modernism. His groundbreaking work had a significant influence on his contemporaries and many subsequent artists to this day. The retrospective at the Fondation Beyeler spans all of the artist's creative periods. Beginning with the paintings from around 1900, the show advances through the revolutionary Fauvist paintings, the experimental works of the 1910s, the sensual paintings from the Nice period and the 1930s, and culminates in the legendary cut-outs of his late period. Drawing on Charles Baudelaire's poem Invitation to the Voyage from 1857, the exhibition and catalogue are conceived as a journey through Matisse's work and life.
Son "American Girl in Italy" - une scène de rue en Italie où une jeune femme est sifflée - est devenue culte. Depuis, des négatifs et des diapositives retrouvés dans ses archives révèlent un côté moins connu de Ruth Orkin, photographe et fille d'une actrice de cinéma muet : celui d'une chroniqueuse du monde des femmes des années 1940 et 1950. Ruth Orkin a imaginé des séries à l'humour grinçant comme Who works harder ? comparant la vie d'une femme de carrière et celle d'une femme au foyer. Elle a documenté l'agitation dans les salons de beauté et les cocktails, les dog shows et les plateaux de cinéma hollywoodiens. On y trouve Lauren Bacall, Jane Russell, Joan Taylor ou Doris Day, mais aussi des serveuses, hôtesses et femmes soldats, ainsi que ses amies : des femmes en mouvement, qui commencent à rejeter les conventions qui leur sont imposées.
Depuis la fin des années 1970, l'artiste canadien Jeff Wall a grandement contribué à faire de la photographie un médium autonome et est considéré comme l'un des principaux précurseurs de la «photographie mise en scène ». Synthétisant la photographie avec des éléments d'autres formes d'art comme la peinture, le cinéma et la littérature, dans un mode complexe qu'il appelle «cinématographie », son travail met en scène des réalités fictionnelles, des souvenirs et des expériences passées dans un processus élaboré. Avec plus d'une cinquantaine d'oeuvres, ce catalogue accompagnant l'exposition à grande échelle de la Fondation Beyeler juxtapose les transparences couleur rétro-éclairées de Jeff Wall à ses photographies plus récentes en noir et blanc et en couleur C-imprime, révélant une grande diversité de contenu et de forme.
The city Fred Herzog documented over more than half a century has vanished-an early kind of urban flaneur, Herzog wandered the streets of Vancouver, creating an archive that encapsulates the essence of a bygone era. Considered today as one of the most important street photographers of the 20th century, he changed the international conversation about early color photography. However, it was only in the late 1950s that he decided to primarily shoot with Kodachrome color slides. Fred Herzog: Black and White is the first acknowledgement of a lesser-known facet of the photographers' work. Complementing the seminal Modern Color, it encompasses almost graphical urban scenes of shadow and light, alongside travel photographs and depictions of rural life. Evoking notions of melancholy, this book reveals that Herzog's appeal lies in his ability to seize a condensation of a psychological state.
"I don't understand how you can walk past a tree without being happy," says Fyodor Dostoyevsky in his novel The Idiot. Perhaps this thought may explain the motif of women in trees, which was popular between the 1920s and 1950s but has not yet been addressed in any book. The enthusiastic collector of anonymous photography Jochen Raiß (1969-2022) discovered these motifs on flea markets. From boxes containing numerous snapshots of other people's lives, wildly jumbled together, he pulled out black-and-white photographs of women gazing into the camera's eye from dizzying heights and in surprising poses.
This new edition of the two previous titles brings together gorgeous photos that Jochen Raiß collected over twenty-five years.
Inspiré par Rembrandt, Chardin et Courbet, Chaïm Soutine a forgé un nouveau langage expressionniste qui fait le pont entre l'histoire de l'art et la modernité en liant la vulnérabilité humaine et les vies en marge de la société. Ses portraits exécutés à larges touches, ses paysages agités et ses célèbres carcasses d'animaux expriment, dans des couleurs vives, un intense appétit de vivre et une profonde aliénation dans un monde incertain. Ce catalogue d'une exposition au Louisiana Museum à Copenhague puis au Kunstmuseum de Berne se concentre sur ses premiers chefs-d'oeuvre et séries créés entre 1919 et 1925. Abordant le thème général de l'émigration et de la dislocation, des essais révèlent les traces des origines juives de Soutine dans son travail, éclairent la signification de ses motifs récurrents et montrent les influences de l'art de Soutine jusqu'à nos jours.
Ce catalogue d'une exposition à la Hayward Gallery à Londres constitue une rétrospective complète sur cinq décennies de carrière de Hiroshi Sugimoto. Time Machine comprend donc des extraits de toutes ses séries majeures, ainsi que des travaux moins connus qui viennent éclairer son approche expérimentale, conceptuelle et innovante avec laquelle il crée ses images dont la lumière est à la fois l'objet et le sujet.
Piet Mondrian had a decisive influence on the development of painting from figuration to abstraction. On the occasion of his 150th birthday, Mondrian Evolution is dedicated to his multifaceted work and artistic development. Initially working in the tradition of Dutch landscape painting of the late 19th century, Symbolism and Cubism subsequently took on great significance for him. It was not until the early 1920s that the artist focused on a wholly non-representational pictorial vocabulary, limited to the rectangular arrangement of black lines with surfaces in white and the primary colors blue, red and yellow. In separate chapters, this path is traced through motifs such as windmills, dunes, and the sea, farms reflected in the water, and plants in various forms of abstraction.
It's All About Freedom presents a comprehensive cross-section through nine decades of Tomi Ungerer's artistic work for the first time-from drawings from the nineteen-thirties to objects from the two thousand-tens. The exhibits selected shed new light on Ungerer's oeuvre by making it possible to comprehend the artistic dimension of the political and stylistic lines and breaks in his oeuvre as a 'freewheeling artist'. His passion for experimenting across genres and the interplay between drawing, collage, and assemblage through which he searched for identity and humanity is thus shown in his work again and again. Developed by the Deichtorhallen Hamburg / Sammlung Falckenberg in cooperation with the Tomi Ungerer Estate and the Musee Tomi Ungerer in Strasbourg, the volume brings together contributions on Tomi Ungerer's life's work by Thomas David, Belinda Grace Gardner, Aria Ungerer, and Therese Willer, with a foreword by Dirk Luckow and Harald Falckenberg.
The exhibition Maison Sonia. Sonia Delaunay and the Atelier Simultane is dedicated to the applied work of Russian-French artist Sonia Delaunay (1885-1979), with a focus on her textile design work. The accompanying catalogue includes the first scholarly essays on Sonia Delaunay's collaborations with silk industrialist Robert Perrier and couturier Jacques Heim, who were among her most important collaborators and previously unexplored. In addition, the publication provides the first overview of the role of Sonia Delaunay's simultaneous fabrics in the design of modern living and media spaces.
Reuniting eight key Basquiat works that mark the graffiti artist's transition to painterly autonomy.
This catalog focuses on eight paintings by Jean-Michel Basquiat made in the summer of 1982, when he traveled to Modena, Italy, for one of his first solo exhibitions in Europe at the gallery of Emilio Mazzoli. Within the span of just a few days, Basquiat painted a group of large-format paintings that surpassed his previous work in both scale and method. Each measuring around 6.5 by 13 feet, these works mark Basquiat's transition from creating graffiti in the streets of Manhattan to painting on canvas. The conception and occasion of the exhibition ultimately proved fraught, and instead of conceding to pressure and expectations, Basquiat canceled the show. The paintings-including masterpieces that today are considered pivotal and among the most outstanding of his oeuvre-have never been shown together. This catalog revisits this crucial moment of Basquiat's career and reunites them for the first time.
Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-88) grew up in Brooklyn. Notoriety came early, from his street paintings made under the tag SAMO. Later he stormed the gallery world, and became an icon of New York's vibrant early-'80s downtown scene, a friend to and collaborator with Andy Warhol and Francesco Clemente, and the cover boy for a 1985 New York Times Magazine story on the new art market. He died following a heroin overdose at 27.
Wayne Thiebaud's famous, literally candy-colored still lifes of pies, cakes, gumball machines, and lipsticks reflect the promise and abundance of the American way of life - a society of plenty, where supply exceeds demand.
The tactile impression created by his pasty layers of paint brings the objects to life and creates an atmosphere in which irony and melancholy are carefully balanced. Testing the possibilities of painterly expression, Thiebaud's brilliant painting technique explores the boundaries of the real and imagined world.
This catalog presents all aspects of the legendary American artist's oeuvre, including still lifes and portraits, as well as his deserted, multi-perspective cityscapes and river landscapes, in luminous pastels that exude a peculiar summertime sadness.
This book provides a comprehensive overview of the fabric works from the last two decades in the career of legendary artist Louise Bourgeois. "I've always had a fascination with the needle," she said, "the magic power of the needle. The needle is used to repair damage. It's a claim to forgiveness." This body of work began when the artist started incorporating clothes from all stages of her life into her art, and later expanded to include a range of other textiles such as bedlinen, handkerchiefs, tapestry, and needlepoint. The fabric works mine the themes of identity and sexuality, trauma and memory, guilt and reparation, and serve as metaphors for emotional and psychological states. The catalog - which accompanies the exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, London and the Gropius Bau, Berlin - features works from numerous series, including the monumental Cell installations, figurative sculptures, and abstract drawings.
Ce catalogue accompagne l'exposition proposée par la Fondation Beyeler au printemps 2020 sur les paysages de Hopper. Celle-ci, organisée conjointement avec le Whitney Museum qui détient la plus grande collection au monde de ses oeuvres, met l'accent sur les représentations iconiques de Hopper des étendues infinies des paysages naturels et urbains de l'Amérique, un aspect rarement mis en avant dans les expositions du peintre. L'exposition réunit des aquarelles et des huiles des années 1910 aux années 1960, offrant ainsi un large et passionnant panorama des multiples facettes de la peinture hoppérienne.
Her sensual Nanas-buxom, colorful female figures laid the foundation for her international success beyond the art world: Niki de Saint Phalle. But the self-taught artist's creative spectrum is much broader, and her unconventional oeuvre, ranging from painting and drawing to assemblages, performances, theatre, film, and architecture, is more subversive and critical of society than is widely assumed. Based on her efforts to process her own feelings, she addressed social and political issues, critically questioning institutions and role models in ways that are as relevant today as they have ever been. The exhibition and the publication shed new light on the artist's exceptional personality and uncover the wide-ranging oeuvre of the popular outsider-that is always surprising and eccentric, emotional, dark and brutal, humorous and cheerful.
Ce catalogue accompagne une exposition présentée à la fondation Beyeler du 17 septembre 2023 au 28 janvier 2024, organisée en partenariat avec le Louisiana Museum à Copenhague et le Musée national géorgien. Comme Vincent van Gogh, Henri Rousseau et Marc Chagall, il a su peindre des tableaux appréciés tant par les gens ordinaires que par les artistes de l'avant-garde. Avec grande sensibilité, le peintre autodidacte, considéré comme une sorte de Douanier Rousseau géorgien, transformait le quotidien en merveilleux, représentant souvent des humains et animaux empreints d'une profonde dignité, évoquant des icônes aux couleurs vives sur fond noir, regardant le spectateur de manière détachée. Réunissant environ 50 oeuvres majeures, il s'agit de la plus importante exposition internationale jamais consacrée à Pirosmani.
Like hardly any other artist, Pierre-Auguste Renoir has shaped our understanding of the atmospheric figure paintings of Impressionism. His painting La fin du dejeuner, which has been in the Stadel Museum in Frankfurt since 1910, is now the starting point for a far-reaching examination of an important source of inspiration that accompanied him throughout his life: the Rococo. Considered frivolous and immoral after the French Revolution, this style of painting experienced a renaissance in the 19th century and was widely celebrated during Renoir's lifetime. Published on the occasion of the Stadel Museum's major exhibition, this comprehensive volume explores Renoir's multifaceted connection to tradition through illuminating juxtapositions of his art with 18th-century works and contemporaries.
Ancient and contemporary Middle Eastern histories fuse in Fattal's sculpture and collage.
Influenced by her experiences of war and migration, Paris-based Syrian-American artist Simone Fattal (born 1942) has transcended boundaries like few other artists of her generation. Born in Damascus, she grew up in Lebanon. After studying philosophy at the École des Lettres in Beirut and the Sorbonne in Paris, she returned to Beirut in 1969 and began to paint. In 1980 she fled the civil war and settled in California with her lifelong partner, the artist and poet Etel Adnan.
Fattal's collages combine pieces from her private archive with historical events in the Arab world. These works suggest the fragility of an identity shaped by migration. Her more abstract ceramic sculptures reference ancient myths and archaeological finds.
Combining essays by long-time associates and new scholarly contributions from international authors, this first comprehensive monograph focuses on Simone Fattal's role as an artist and as a publisher of Post-Apollo Press.
A l'automne 2021, la fondation Beyeler organise, avec le soutien du musée du Prado à Madrid, une des expositions les plus importantes jamais consacrées à Francisco de Goya (1746-1828) hors d'Espagne. Celle-ci réunit soixante-dix tableaux, accompagnés d'un choix de dessins et de gravures, qui emporteront les visiteurs dans un voyage vers le beau et l'étrange. Le catalogue de cette exposition présente donc cet ensemble unique, comportant des tableaux rarement montrés à ce jour, appartenant à des collections privées espagnoles, conjointement à des oeuvres-clés provenant des musées et des collections les plus célèbres d'Europe et des États-Unis.
The Swiss artist MIRIAM CAHN (*1949, Basel) deals with political and social themes in oil paintings; charcoal, chalk, and colored and lead pencil drawings; and in photographs, films, and installations. Strong color is characteristic of her work, forming a stark contrast to the recurring motifs of violence, tenderness, war, destruction, and physical infirmity. Her habit of commenting upon her work in writing is a golden thread running throughout Cahn's career. She illuminates her own art, commenting in the process on art and world events, and she sets up the texts opposite her artworks in exhibitions and publications.
