Kunstmuseum Bern

The works of American artist Amy Sillman are bursting with the joy of painting. They are colorful, abstract, show complex shapes, but also figures or body parts. However, Sillman's passion for art goes beyond paintings and invites us to take on new perspectives.

Amy Sillman (b. 1955) is an important voice in American contemporary painting. Since the 1990s, she has consistently questioned the medium via drawing, printmaking and writing, as well as by making objects and animations.

Curator: Kathleen Bühler

Cooperation: The exhibition is being organised in collaboration with the Ludwig Forum Aachen.

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The Rupf Collection, on permanent loan to the Kunstmuseum Bern, is closely associated with the story of the important gallery owner and defender of the Cubists, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler. Bern businessman Hermann Rupf’s activity as a collector began around 1907 – as the first client of Kahnweiler’s gallery in Paris.

Hitherto unpublished archive material reflects for the first time the precarious years between 1933 and 1945, when in spite of adverse circumstances Rupf and Kahnweiler maintained their close contact, corresponded about artists and art or conversed about everyday matters such as condensed milk and illnesses. From 1940, it was some correspondence ‘in the shadow of the crematoria’, as Kahnweiler later put it. Thanks to his lifelong friendship with the collector couple from Bern, Kahnweiler survived the worst crises of the time. The exhibition casts light on the collection with particular reference to this friendship in extraordinary times.

Curator: Susanne Friedli, Konrad Tobler

Featuring works by: Georges Braque, Eugène de Kermadec, André Derain, Othon Friesz, Max Fueter, Juan Gris, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Henri Laurens, Fernand Léger, August Macke, André Masson, Ewald Mataré, Pablo Picasso, Florian Slotawa.

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Marisa Merz (1926–2019) was one of the leading figures of the post-war Italian art scene, and closely associated with the Arte Povera group, the only woman to be so. The subtle power of her work is apparent in her relationship with silence and poetry, and in her search for the fragility of art corresponding to that of life. 

In her studio, the sculptor and installation artist transformed space and time into a large collage. At the same time, she moved between numerous art-historical references and a great variety of everyday objects and materials – from aluminium to clay, from copper to nylon, from wax to fabric. Thirty years after her first comprehensive institutional exhibition in Switzerland, the Kunstmuseum Bern is showing iconic artworks alongside works that have not previously been shown and archive material. 

Curator: Livia Wermuth

An exhibition of LaM – Lille Métropole, musée d’art moderne, d’art contemporain et d’art brut, Kunstmuseum Bern and Fridericianum Kassel. In collaboration with Fondazione Merz, Turin. 

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Sexuality, madness, illness and death are the big human themes and elemental experiences that Carol Rama (1918–2015) addressed in her art. She is one of the outstanding modern women artists, who came to fame late in life. 

As early as the 1940s, Rama paved the way for contemporary feminist art with representations of female desire. Independent of schools and artistic groups, she created an unconventional and very personal body of work over a period of about sixty years. The Kunstmuseum Bern is showing the first comprehensive survey exhibition in Switzerland devoted to the Turin artist, with works from all the creative phases of her extraordinary œuvre. It includes insistently expressive portraits, object montages in the surrealist tradition, as well as abstract paintings and works made of industrial materials. 

Curator: Livia Wermuth

An exhibition of SCHIRN KUNSTHALLE FRANKFURT in collaboration with Kunstmuseum Bern.

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In 1933 the Kunsthalle Bern held the biggest retrospective of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner in his lifetime. The German artist, now considered one of the most outstanding protagonists of classical modern art, curated the show in close collaboration with Max Huggler (1903–1994), the then head of the Kunsthalle and later director of the Kunstmuseum Bern. 

With Kirchner × Kirchner the Kunstmuseum Bern is looking back at that significant event, while presenting Kirchner as the curator of his own work for the first time. Central to the exhibition is the way in which Kirchner interpreted his artistic development, generously revising it by reworking his paintings or writing texts about Heimelf, and the connections that he established between his works. The exhibition includes some 70 works made in the period between 1908 and 1933, from renowned European and American museums and private collections. The selection of exhibits, in combination with the historical background, makes this ambitious exhibition project a unique and multi-layered experience.

Curator: Nadine Franci

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