Cy Twombly

12.09.2015 – 13.03.2016
http://www.kunstmuseumbasel.ch/

The American Cy Twombly was a key member of the new generation of artists to emerge in the 1950s. Like his close friends Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, he broke away from American Expressionism to develop his own unique and influential pictorial language.

The exhibition focuses on the paintings and sculptures from the 1950s to the 1970s in the collection of the Kunstmuseum Basel accompanied by exclusive select loans. Together they trace the development of what is arguably Twombly’s most outstanding artistic period. The exhibition will also present Twombly’s painting Untitled, 1969 (Bolsena) for the first time, a gift from Katharina and Wilfrid Steib. The painting’s pencil hatchings describe a window-like opening against a white color field.

Von Bildern. Strategien der Aneignung

29.8.2015 – 17.01.2016
http://www.kunstmuseumbasel.ch/

John Baldessari, Marcel Broodthaers, Harun Farocki, Andrea Fraser, Nina Könnemann, Louise Lawler, Sherrie Levine, Hilary Lloyd, Michaela Meise, Richard Prince and Cindy Sherman.

Von Bildern presents art based on the appropriation of existing pictures and genres. Such processes often entail transfers from one medium into another: a photograph is filmed, a painting is photographed, or a scene in a film is tapped as the source for a staged photograph. Appropriation adds a new perspective on the content of the material being appropriated and calls its authenticity and authorship in question. It may articulate a critical study of visual models and blueprints from mass and entertainment media and the templates of identity they transmit. Or it may point up the forever fluid borders and commerce between the visual arts and the culture industry. Appropriation can tell stories of the media trajectories along which patterns and forms migrate between the genres and apparatuses of distribution. Or it scrutinizes practices that evolve in the interplay between the publicity generated by institutions and private marketing.

The exhibition considers strategies of appropriation as a form of discourse in and about pictures. It widens the scope of reflection beyond the formal qualities of pictures to examine the various institutional and social settings and channels in which they originate and circulate.