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 2008
- Plakat Jahresausstellung 2008
Gestaltung Stefan Rüesch
Annual Exhibition of Artists from Graubünden
Bündner Kunstmuseum Chur, December 21, 2008 to January 25, 2009
Every year it is with excited anticipation that this show of works by artists from Graubünden is welcomed. A competent jury and a careful installation make for an exhibit that is highly regarded far beyond the region. This informative and substantial annual exhibition encompasses a varied selection of categories from painting, sculpture and drawing to photography, videos and installations. It brings together younger and older, renowned and newly discovered artists in insightful dialogues and confrontations. At all events there is much to see, to discover and to discuss. The popular exhibit is an important platform for conveying and promoting current artistic work from Graubünden. However, it does not give a representative overview, but instead a succinct insight into current artistic production, which is all the more exciting and surprising. From a multitude of entries a jury panel of five choose those entries by artists, which fulfil the qualitative requirements.
This year the following artists are represented:
Remo Alig (*1971), Mathias Balzer (*1932), Guido Baselgia (*1953), Mirko Baselgia (*1982), Gregori Bezzola (*1970), Flurin Bischoff (*1955), Michel Borgmann (*1973), Bianca Brunner (*1974), Kurt Caviezel (*1964), Bignia Corradini (*1951), Walter Derungs (*1970), Menga Dolf (*1963), Christoph Draeger (*1965), Milena Ehrensperger (*1978) / Jérémie Mercier (*1979), Ladina Gaudenz (*1962), Gabriela Gerber (*1970) / Lukas Bardill (*1968), Conrad J. Godly (*1962) , Annatina Graf (*1965), Chris Hunter (*1983), Monica Ursina Jäger (*1974), Patricia Jegher (*1966), Ladina Just (*1989), Zilla Leutenegger (*1968), Catrin Lüthi K (*1953), Gaspare Melcher (*1945), Gaudenz Metzger (*1980), Ursula Palla (*1961), Michel Pfister (*1966), Stefan Rüesch (*1963), Corinne Rusch (*1973), Gaudenz Signorell (*1950), Gioni Signorell (*1949), Venice Spescha (*1956), Sandra Tschuor (*1979), Georg Tannò (*1946), Hannes Vogel (*1938), Pascale Wiedemann (*1966) / Daniel Mettler (*1965), Lydia Wilhelm (*1975), Dominik Zehnder (*1973), Thomas Zindel (*1956)
- Monika von Aarburg
Distraction VI, 2007
Monika von Aarburg – MANOR-Kunstpreis
+ FLEX Artist’s Collective
Bündner Kunstmuseum Chur, October 10 to November 23, 2008
Monika von Aarburg (*1972) is being awarded this year’s MANOR-Kunstpreis Chur. We are very happy that the Bündner Kunstmuseum can not only organise the first solo exhibit, but can also arrange for the first publication for this promising young artist.
Monika von Aarburg grew up in Chur and now lives in Zürich. She studied at the renowned department “Médias-mixtes” of the Ecole Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Geneva. Although the artist moves with ease between the different medias, she has still developed her own imagery. Mostly she translates found pictures from nature and everyday life or from archives into vector graphics and then continues to process them in computer animations, analogue drawings done by hand or adhesive foil pictures that remind of pixels. Thematically von Aarburg circles around questions on the disappearance of tradition as well as on the function of the image in our memory and our perception.
The exhibition in Chur starts with a range of new Tipp-Ex works (Distraction V-VII). The hand drawn floral motifs present a dynamic contrast to their digitally artistic total effect. In the adjoining room and with the same title Distraction IV an animation is projected, in which branches and foliage are subjected to a constant metamorphosis. The repeated change from a recognisable form into an abstract one and back again into readable subject matter is in a way consistent with an extreme slowing down of the human act of perception. With her extensive and spectacular wall installation von Aarburg again refers in a different way to the pixelised, fragmented perception of our digitalised era. A historical Bündner cross-stitch pattern is projected in countless reflecting foil dots directly on to the museum wall. In the same room the artist has set up an audio installation with floor lamps, which not only give light, but from which also sounds are emitted in the form of personal stories and memories of older people.
In the basement of her exhibit Monika von Aarburg has invited the artist’s collective FLEX to do a presentation. Von Aarburg is part of this group whose members – consisting of her former fellow students Carola Bürgi, Saskia Edens, Christian Gräser, Françoise Kohler and Niklaus Strobel – are not associated with respect to style, but by agreement as to content.
Katharina Ammann
Opening and Award Ceremony for the MANOR-Kunstpreis
Thursday, October 9, 2008, at 6 pm
Presentation of the MANOR-Kunstpreis: Pierre-André Maus, board member, Maus Frères, SA, Genève
Publication
Monika von Aarburg. Artist’s book and catalogue, with a text by Katharina Ammann and a preface by Beat Stutzer, designed by Violeta Tschäppeler, price CHF 28.- (for members of the Bündner Kunstverein CHF 22.-)
Guided Tours
Public tours with Katharina Ammann: Oct. 16 / Nov. 6, from 12.30 to 1.30 pm
Public tour with curator and artist: Oct. 30, from 12.30 to 1.30 pm
Long Saturday 2008
Intervention by FLEX artist’s collective, November 15, at 8.30 pm
- Hans Danuser
Caplutta Sogn Benedetg Sumvitg I, 1988
„Am Nabel der Welt“. Art from Graubünden
Bündner Kunstmuseum Chur, June 21 to September 21, 2008
After nearly twenty years the collection of the Bündner Kunstmuseum is now shown in an altogether new presentation. Even though the indispensable “highlights” are included - such as the works of Angelika Kauffmann, Ferdinand Hodler, Giovanni Segantini, Giovanni, Augusto and Alberto Giacometti, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and others - surprising, perceptive and fascinating dialogues and confrontations offer new insight into the works exhibited. This new presentation of the collection is so important that it has been extended to make up an exhibition in its own right. With the title „Am Nabel der Welt“. Art from Graubünden our own collection has been positively consolidated and newly focussed. A selection of important works by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Augusto Giacometti, Alberto Giacometti, Max Ernst, Günther Förg, Gerhard Richter and Dieter Hall from private ownership and the museum definitely throw light on the subject, by stimulating the discourse in the form of revealing comparisons and exemplary confrontations.
The fascinating dialogue between “world” and “homeland”, the global and the regional, the constant discourse between abidance and reaching out is a basic feature of art from Graubünden: Many a famous artist from Graubünden, for example Alberto Giacometti or Not Vital, went out into the world, coming back again frequently, however, enriched with experience to their place of origin. Others, like Giovanni Segantini, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Otto Dix, Niklaus Stoecklin, Günther Förg or Gerhard Richter were almost magically drawn to Graubünden and have left their traces here. Again and again these artists have more or less explicitly used the mountain landscape of Graubünden as a reference, and so reflected on the springhead of their work and thus also raised the essential question concerning the native and the foreign.
Beat Stutzer
Guided Tours
On the following Thursdays at 12:30: July 3, 17, 24 and 31; August 21; September 4 and 18.
Art over Lunch – Picture viewing for the modest appetite
On the following Thursdays 12:30 to 1 pm: August 14 and 28; September 25
Short Guide to the Collection
For the new presentation of the collection there is a short illustrated guide, which briefly and clearly introduces the most important artists and their works: Publications on the Bündner Kunstsammlung 2, ed. by the Stiftung Bündner Kunstsammlung, available in German, Romance, Italian and English.
- Ursula Palla
Flowers I, 2001/2
Ursula Palla - Strange Paradise.
Videos and Installations 2001 – 2008
Bündner Kunstmuseum Chur, March 29 to May 25, 2008
Ursula Palla was born in Chur in 1961. Her solo exhibition shows videos and installations from the years between 2001 and 2008. In these the artist explores landscape concepts and plant motifs in the broadest sense and, at first glance, creates harmless idylls: deserted mountain landscapes, lush flower still-lives, butterflies on blossoming twigs, as well as lonely islands in the South Seas. These aesthetically appealing video films - arranged as installations - invite the viewer to relax both mentally and physically, to occupy the as yet uninhabited idylls, and to delight the soul with their peaceful atmosphere.
With her Arcadian settings Ursula Palla responds to today’s yearning for a small idyll of ones own, which is all the more longed for the more our merciless day to day living makes it impossible. However, following a first inspection these idylls are revealed as fractured. The artist makes them end up as real or suggested catastrophes. She disrupts them effectively and in a brutal way confronts them with reality in order to unmask them as fleeting apparitions. Sometimes she also makes them dependent on the viewer’s behaviour. Many video installations are “interactive”. Alternative film sequences are activated by bodily movement in the exhibition space and thus also refer the idyll back to reality.
With her humorous but melancholy and critical works Ursula Palla combines this contemporary yearning for the idyllic with a questioning of the cinematic power of illusion and examines the effect of such wishful projections. Last but not least one feels the influence of her early artistic conditioning brought about by her visits at the Bündner Kunstmuseum Chur with its landscapes by Giovanni Segantini, Giovanni, Augusto and Alberto Giacometti. Ursula Palla’s “videastic” approach comes close to the painterly and the idyllic with its ruptures and irritations and creates this Strange Paradise from recalled, wished for, and broken concepts of paradise.
Kathleen Bühler
Discussion
Ursula Palla in discussion with Ursula Perucchi-Petri (former vice-director and head of the graphics collection and video collection of the Kunsthaus Zürich), on April 10 at 7 pm.
Catalogue
Ursula Palla – Strange Paradise, ed. by Kathleen Bühler with contributions by Beat Stutzer, Angelika Affentranger-Kirchrath, Patrick Huber and Kathleen Bühler, Bündner Kunstmuseum Chur 2008, CHF 28.- (CHF 20.- for BKV members), plus postage (German and English edition).
- Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
Rückkehr der Tiere, 1919
Expressionism from the mountains.
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Philipp Bauknecht, Jan Wiegers and the group "rot–blau"
Bündner Kunstmuseum Chur, February 16 to May 25, 2008
The exhibit illustrates for the first time the intensive artistic and personal exchange between Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880-1938) and a number of younger colleagues during his early years in Davos. Besides the German Philipp Bauknecht (1884-1938) and the Dutch Jan Wiegers (1893-1959) who had already come to Graubünden before Kirchner, these are the three founding members of the Basel group “Rot-Blau” Albert Müller (1897-1926), Hermann Scherer (1893-1927) and Paul Camenisch (1893-1970). They all spent longer periods in Davos, often as Kirchner’s guests, and were at times on close friendly terms with him. In most cases this led to an intensive artistic dialogue, which was evidently productive not only for the younger artists but also for Kirchner himself. The sculptor Scherer, for example, was introduced to painting by Kirchner in 1924. Undoubtedly inspired by the example of his older colleague, Scherer then started that series of wood sculptures, which to this day have secured him a place in art history. On the other hand, Kirchner felt incited by Scherer’s competition to once again increasingly devote himself to sculpture. The young artists were, however, never content to imitate Kirchner’s style, but translated the partly obvious debt to their mentor’s art into something, which was definitely personal and autonomous.
In the exhibit the thematically arranged works of the six artists show analogies but also differences. They frequently not only represent the same motifs but also have the same subject matter. Besides mountain landscapes, scenes from everyday life in the mountains of Davos, and nudes; they also did many portraits of each other, numerous self-portraits, as well as single and group portraits, all of which affirm to this very day their personal connectedness. A further subject area, and at the same time a counterpoint to the alpine scenery, is the mountainous landscape of the Mendrisiotto, where Scherer, Müller and Camenisch liked to spend their time.
Besides paintings, the exhibit also includes numerous sculptures, drawings, watercolours and graphic works. Focus is on the years before 1927, when the relationship between the artists practically came to an end owing to the early death of Müller and Scherer and the final return of Wiegers to Holland.
Beat Stutzer
Catalogue
Expressionismus aus den Bergen. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Philipp Bauknecht, Jan Wiegers und die Gruppe Rot-Blau, ed. Beat Stutzer, Han Steenbruggen, Samuel Vitali and Matthias Frehner, with contributions by Kathleen Bühler, Matthias Frehner, Wolfgang Henze, Roland Scotti, Peter Suter, Beat Stutzer, Samuel Vitali, as well as the annotated text by Georg Schmidt “Ein Gang durch die Winterthurer Kirchnerausstellung“ (1924), Verlag Scheidegger & Spiess AG, Zürich 2007, CHF 68.- (CHF 48.- for BKV members), plus postage.
The exhibit was put together in collaboration with the Kunstmuseum Bern and the Groninger Museum.