- Jahresprogramm 2007 (PDF)
Bündner Kunstmuseum
Postplatz
CH–7000 Chur
Tel. ++41 81 257 28 68
Fax ++41 81 257 21 72
E-mail: info(at)bkm.gr.ch
Öffnungszeiten
Montag geschlossen
Di–So 10–17 Uhr
Archive Exhibitions 2007
- Angelika Kauffmann
Selbstbildnis, um 1780
«Angelicamad!» On the 200th anniversary of the death of Angelica Kauffmann
Bündner Kunstmuseum Chur, November 16, 2007 to January 1, 2008
When Angelica Kauffmann was born on October 30, 1741 in the Reichsgasse in Chur, nobody suspected that the daughter of the travelling artist Joseph Johann Kauffmann from the Bregenzer forest and of the midwife Cleofea Lutz from Chur would once become a neoclassical painter of international magnitude. Angelica was given a careful education and received training in painting and singing and was soon considered a child prodigy. After travels through Italy she came to Rome in 1763, where she met with famous personalities from cultural life and intellectual circles. Her first breakthrough was her much admired Bildnis Winckelmanns. From then on wealthy English visitors to Rome had their portraits painted by her.
In 1766 Angelica Kauffmann moved to London where she soon became very successful even with the English royal family. Her history painting on themes by poets of classical antiquity as well as English history soon gained recognition. She was a founding member of the Royal Academy. Clever and with a good business sense, she had her work reproduced by engravers and saw to it that her motifs became known internationally. «The whole world is angelicamad» – this memorable sentence illustrates Kauffmanns popularity at the time in half of Europe.
In 1781 Angelica Kauffmann married the Venetian landscape painter Antonio Zucchi and returned to Italy. In Rome she opened a studio, which belonged to the city’s most renowned. Practically unrivalled, she worked for the most influential visitors to Rome who wanted to bring back a portrait as «souvenir». Even the illustrious high nobility belonged to her clientele. She developed so called «Herzensfreundschaften» – friendships of the heart – with Johann Wolfgang Goethe («a woman of formidable talent»), Johann Gottfried Herder, Anna Amalie von Sachsen-Weimar and last but not least with numerous female artists. Her friends revered her as “the tenth muse of Rome” and as “perhaps the most cultivated woman in Europe”. In addition Angelica Kauffmann was considered the embodiment of the new female ideal “der schönen Seele” – the beautiful soul.
With this exhibit - albeit small but furnished with high-class loans from the Vorarlberger Landesmuseum, from private owners and from our own collection - the Bündner Kunstmuseum honours the 200th anniversary of the famous painter’s death in Rome on November 5, 1807.
Beat Stutzer
Veranstaltungen
- Donnerstag, 6. Dezember 2007, 19.30 Uhr «Eine Dichterin mit dem Pinsel»
Gisela Zoch-Westphal liest aus Tagebüchern und Briefen von Angelika Kauffmann - Donnerstag, 13. Dezember 2007, 19.30 Uhr «Der prüfende Blick»
Gabrielle Alioth liest aus ihrem Roman über Angelica Kauffmann - Donnerstag, 17. Januar 2008, 20.00 Uhr «Soirée musicale»
Musik aus der Zeit von Angelika Kauffmann von W.A. Mozart, Pietro Leone, François-Joseph Gossec, Niccolò Paganini und aus der von Planta-Gitarrenhandschrift von 1806, mit Robert Viski, Violine, und Robert Grossmann, Gitarre und Mandoline
- Yoko Ono
Fly, 1970
Carnal pleasure - or the pleasure of representing the sensual
Bündner Kunstmuseum Chur, September 9 to November 18, 2007
The exhibition "Carnal Pleasure" is a thematic exhibit at the Bündner Kunstmuseum, mostly compiled of works by artists existent in our collection, but supplemented also with selected items relevant to the present theme.
The title in accordance with its diverse aspects of culinary and erotic pleasures is interpreted last but not least as the joy the artist has in representing skin, flesh and bodies. It includes not only the celebration of life, youth, and beauty but also explores signs of physical illness and decay. The exhibit does not only want to provide an entertaining tour of our collection (augmented by pertinent supplementary works), but is also based on art historical statements, such as Georges Didi-Huberman’s essay on "La peinture encarné" (Ger. 2002; Fr. 1985). Starting with the Renaissance, the author examines how standard representations of naked bodies are ultimately based on a belief in a magical power of the image, which allows painting to become flesh. Hidden behind the traditional recipes in the countless painting treatises on the manufacture of seemingly lifelike skin tones is the belief that the representation should not only seem deceptively alive but should actually come alive. This phantasma in painting has by no means been abandoned in gestural abstract painting; it finds there its special expression.
The exhibition includes works from the collection of the Bündner Kunstmuseum and loans from Swiss art museums and private collections. These thematically bundled contrapositions show an obvious delight in the representation of flesh, corporeality, and bodies from the beginning of the 20th century to the present; not only in painting but also in sculpture, photography and video, and in an installation which was specially produced for the exhibition.
The artists represented in the exhibit are: Giovanni Giacometti, Alberto Giacometti, Wilfrid Moser, Charles Rollier, Varlin, Fischli/Weiss, Dieter Roth, Josef Felix Müller, Hans Danuser, Pascale Wiedemann and Daniel Mettler, Robert Cavegn, Menga Dolf, Gaspare Melcher, Katharina Henking, and Judith Albert. The exhibits are complemented by a programme of short films and videos from the 1960s and 1970s by Yoko Ono, Carolee Schneemann, Bruce Nauman and Kurt Kren.
Publication
Fleischeslust – oder die Lust an der Darstellung des Fleischlichen, (Schriften zur Sammlung des Bündner Kunstmuseums 1) with texts by Beat Stutzer and Kathleen Bühler, Scheidegger & Spiess Zürich 2007, 84 pages, 67 colour illustrations, CHF 28 (BKV CHF 20), plus postage.
- HR Giger
Gebärmaschine, 1967
HR Giger – Works before «alien», 1961–1976
Bündner Kunstmuseum Chur, June 30 to September 9, 2007
With his Phantastic Realism H.R. Giger (born 1940 in Chur, lives and works in Zürich) holds one of the most autonomous positions in the succession of post war surrealism. This is also the case for the neodadaist art scene in Zürich of the late 1960s. Up until the middle of the 1970s he created a fulminant œuvre which in its far-reaching significance and in its artistic content is underrated – particularly since this phase was followed by the monster "Alien", with which the artist became world famous and which earned him the Oscar for Best Achievement in Visual Effects.
The exhibit shows Giger’s work starting with its origins, the early India ink drawings, then the series on Schächte, the nightmarish Passagen , the realistic, claustrophobic Nasszellen pictures, up to the Hautlandschaften, and the airbrush drawings. In order to understand the hidden source and stimuli in his early work, side glances at prints by Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Johann Heinrich Füssli, Francisco José de Goya, Max Klinger, James Ensor, and Alfred Kubin position Giger’s œuvre within a small "art history of horror".
Many of Giger’s works have never or only seldom been presented to the public. After the retrospective of 1984 at the Seedamm-Kulturzentrum in Pfäffikon and after the last large Giger exhibitions in Paris, Prag, and Vienna his œuvre can now be seen for the first time in Switzerland in a comprehensive museum exhibition at the Bündner Kunstmuseum in Chur.
Beat Stutzer
Publication
HR Giger – Werke 1961-1976, with texts by Carlos Arenas, Fritz Billeter, Kathleen Bühler and Beat Stutzer, approx. 140 pages, numerous, mostly colour illustrations, paperback with book jacket, Chur 2007, CHF 40.- (CHF 28.- for BKV members), plus postage.
Film Showings
August 23 and September 6, Thursdays 7:30 pm respectively at the Bündner Kunstmuseum Chur. Early, little known cinematic works by HR Giger as well as short films made in collaboration with Fredi M. Murer for «Swiss-made» (1968) or «Passagen» (1971) will be on view. After the showing H.R. Giger will comment on his work interviewed by Beat Stutzer.
- Pablo Picasso
6.4.1968 III, 1968
From day to day.
Pablo Picasso, Hanne Darboven, Not Vital
Bündner Kunstmuseum Chur, April 28 to June 10, 2007
The autobiographical - as life narrative or as in structures similar to diaries - holds a central position in modern art in determining identity or as a coming to terms with ones own mortality. Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) constantly painted and drew against time – with advancing age more than ever - when he created over 160 etchings in a true blaze of activity “from day to day” between March 16 and October 5, 1968.
The spectrum of Picasso’s works exhibited reaches from 1905 to 1971 and thus includes – with different focal points – all of the artist’s periods from early cubism beyond surrealism up to his last works. All exhibits were formerly in the collection of Georges Bloch. The Swiss collector donated a total of something over 500 graphic prints by Pablo Picasso to the Gottfried Keller-Stiftung in 1972 and then again in 1979. Since then this excellent inventory has been distributed to several Swiss art museums (Basel, Berne, Chur, Geneva, St. Gallen, Zürich, and Vevey) and is now being brought together in the Bündner Kunstmuseum in a
carefully chosen selection.
In order to quasi update the art of this 20th century genius, the works of Picasso are to be confronted with younger contemporary positions: With a large, strictly conceptual, rigorous piece by Hanne Darboven (*1941) as well as with selected works by Not Vital (*1948), who similar to Picasso enjoys taking on animal form and thus evokes a similar symbolic allegorisation as the Spaniard.
Beat Stutzer
- Alberto Giacometti
Eli Lotar III, 1965
Tested, Donated, Welcomed: New Donations and Deposits
Bündner Kunstmuseum Chur, February 24 to April 9, 2007
At the heart of every museum is its collection. A continuous and consistent enlargement keeps it vital and fit for the future. The purposeful expansion of the inventory is brought about by carefully made acquisitions: To close gaps, to wisely replenish the existing or to open up new areas. However, beside the strategy of actively and persistently collecting by means of new purchases, in numbers the donations, legacies (bequests) and deposits (permanent loans), account for a much larger contribution to the constant and often rapid growth of the collection.
The exhibition shows only the tip of a mighty iceberg: Alone in the last three years the most beautiful, most exciting and most interesting works which have come to the Bündner art collection as donations or deposits all in all make up approximately 200 new works, which in this short time make for a considerable expansion. Donations happen on the one hand quasi out of the blue; on the other hand they are the result of long standing good relationships between the museum and the collectors. And not infrequently legacies and donations are an expression of good faith and appreciation for the efforts on the part of the museum, combined with a wish to preserve special works permanently for the general public.
Just as collectors donate, so do gallery owners or artists. There is the individual case as well as donations on a continual basis, in which case the same donor contributes works repeatedly and at best over a period of many years. Single pieces as well as small groups of works or quite large compilations are entrusted. Even though each donation or permanent loan is important for the collection as a whole, there are obviously those true godsends, which instantaneously upgrade the compendium and create new focal points. One of these is undoubtedly Hodler’s splendid Berglandschaft bei Champéry (Mountain Landscape at Champéry) and Alberto Giacometti’s Eli Lotar III – outstanding works of art, the purchase of which has long since become too exorbitant for a museum of our dimension.
Beat Stutzer
- Giovanni Giacometti
Silsersee mit Kanal, von Capolago aus gesehen, um 1910
Giovanni Giacometti – Works on Paper
Bündner Kunstmuseum Chur, February 17 to April 9, 2007
The artist Giovanni Giacometti (1868-1933) from the Bergell is one of the most significant Swiss artists of the beginning 20th century. His encounter in his early years with Giovanni Segantini was a determining factor. After 1900 he freed himself from this influence and studied the post-impressionist painting of Paul Cézanne and Vincent van Gogh. Although Giovanni Giacometti’s work was by then formally sophisticated, he invariably used motifs found in his familiar everyday surroundings in Stampa and Maloja. These are mostly representations of his family and of the Bergell and Engadin landscapes in the course of the seasons.
The exhibit is entirely focused on Giovanni Giacometti’s drawings as well as his graphic work, and presents a comprehensive survey thanks to valuable loans from his estate and from private as well as museum collections. New, little known aspects of his oeuvre await discovery, such as for example his figurative drawings – hitherto largely kept hidden – which in their delicate, searching, minute lines remind us of his son Augusto’s early sheets. Being a gifted colourist Giovanni Giacometti also fascinates with his masterly watercolours, which show a rare freshness. And he furthermore amazes us with a series of innovative woodcuts in which for instance the glistening light is evoked exclusively by the interplay of black and white.
Beat Stutzer
Publication
Giovanni Giacometti. Arbeiten auf Papier, with texts in German by Ulrich Gerster, Beat Stutzer and Christoph Vögele, Kehrer Verlag Heidelberg, 184 pages, approx. 85 colour and 80 black and white illustrations, CHF 49.-, plus postage.