The Zentrum Paul Klee – the landscape sculpture by Italian architect Renzo Piano – goes beyond the scope of the traditional art museum. Temporary exhibitions, guided tours and events that include concerts, theatre, readings and workshops at the Kindermuseum Creaviva underscore the appeal of the world’s most important collection of works by Paul Klee.
As a conference centre the Zentrum Paul Klee boasts the ideal infrastructure.
The permanent exhibition offers visitors a chronological overview of Klee's artistic oeuvre and presents around seventy works as well as biographical material and archive items, which are changed regularly.
As one of the most important artists of modernism, Paul Klee (1879–1940) sought new forms of expression that did justice to the social and cultural upheavals of his time. He questioned everything that was taught in Europe and orientated himself towards children's drawings and non-European cultures as well as the structures and processes of nature. He also explored artistic movements such as Expressionism, Cubism, Dadaism, Surrealism and Constructivism without joining any of these groups. Klee commented on political events with ironic detachment in numerous works. The First and Second World Wars had far-reaching consequences for Klee's life. His networks broke up and led to the artist's isolation.
The ‘Fokus’ room houses small exhibitions, each focusing on a different aspect of Paul Klee's life or work.
In the first half of the 20th century artists in Brazil sought a modern artistic expression of their own. Particularly in the first decades, the European avant-garde – including Paul Klee – was just as important a reference as the country’s own indigenous and Afro-Brazilian cultures.
As well as parallels with the investigations of European modern art, differences consistent with the political, social and cultural situation also become apparent. The exhibition shows the different ways in which Brazilian artists developed their own modern pictorial languages. It presents ten artists and an introduction to formative political and economic events as well as milestones in the country’s literature, music, design and architecture.
Artists:
Tarsila do Amaral (1886–1973)*
Anita Malfatti (1889–1964)*
Lasar Segall (1891–1957)
Alfredo Volpi (1896–1988)*
Vicente do Rego Monteiro (1899–1970)
Flávio de Carvalho (1899–1973)
Candido Portinari (1903–1962)*
Djanira da Motta e Silva (1914–1979)*
Rubem Valentim (1922–1991)*
Geraldo de Barros (1923–1998)
* exhibited at the Venice Biennale
Curators: Fabienne Eggelhöfer, Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, and Roberta Saraiva Coutinho, São Paulo, with Adrian Locke, Royal Academy of Arts, London
The exhibition is organised by the Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern in collaboration with the Royal Academy of Arts, London, where it will be on display from 28 January until 21 April 2025.
The 20th century was the age of the avant-gardes. All over the world, movements formed with a desire for a radical redesign of the world and a rethinking of art. To spread their visions, many avant-garde movements published journals.
These allowed a global exchange of artistic ideas, as happens today on the World Wide Web. The journals did not only contain manifestos, images and programmatic texts that could not be published anywhere else, but also embodied artistic visions in terms of design and typography. From the contemporary point of view these journals are not only unique art-historical sources; they also set standards in the history of design. For that reason, the exhibition casts light for the first time on journals as a central and globally deployed medium of artistic modernity, in which art and design, form and content become a single unit.
FOKUS: Journals of the Avant-Garde is part of the permanent exhibition Kosmos Klee.
The permanent exhibition Kosmos Klee. The Collection offers visitors a chronological overview of Klee's artistic oeuvre and presents around seventy works as well as biographical material and archive items, which are regularly changed. Smaller focus exhibitions with a thematic reference to Paul Klee and his work are shown in one room at a time.
To coincide with its 20-year anniversary, the Zentrum Paul Klee is devoting a major exhibition to the Swiss-French artist-architect Le Corbusier (1887–1965). One of the most influential protagonists of modern architecture and art, Le Corbusier tried to harness his unbridled creativity and enormous energy to reshape the world according to his ideas, to ‘order’ it and create a new living environment through functional and aesthetic architecture. Today, some of his buildings are UNESCO World Heritage Sites.
The exhibition is based around Le Corbusier’s three-dimensional thought and design. The prelude to the architecture is at the centre: the artistic experiment in the ‘workshop of patient research’, as Le Corbusier described his artistic work; feeling one’s way gradually towards the architectural form in studies and plans; the artistic engagement with colour and form, composition and space – and the sources that flow into the process: from found objects on the beach to the architecture of classical antiquity.
Curator: Martin Waldmeier
Paul Klee is distinguished by his twin talents as an artist and a musician. As a young man already, he played the violin in the city orchestra, and it was difficult for him to make the decision between music and art.
He chose visual art because in that field he saw more opportunities to create something completely new. In his works he transposed musical aspects such as rhythm, melody and polyphony into art, and also taught this at the Bauhaus. Even today many pieces are composed on the basis of his works. The Fokus exhibition addresses this cross-fertilisation.
Curators: Fabienne Eggelhöfer and Marianne Keller Tschirren
Fokus. The Musical Klee is part of the permanent exhibition Kosmos Klee.
The permanent exhibition Kosmos Klee. The Collection offers visitors a chronological overview of Klee's artistic oeuvre and presents around seventy works as well as biographical material and archive items, which are regularly changed. Smaller focus exhibitions with a thematic reference to Paul Klee and his work are shown in one room at a time.
Why do so many – hundreds, if not thousands of – books of twentieth century philosophy, psychotherapy or critical theory feature the art of Paul Klee on their covers? Cover Star Klee draws a portrait of the artist as a prophet of analogue meme culture, which invites us to judge a book by its cover.
Curator: Dieter Roelstraete
Fokus. Cover Star Klee is part of the permanent exhibition Kosmos Klee.
The permanent exhibition Kosmos Klee. The Collection offers visitors a chronological overview of Klee's artistic oeuvre and presents around seventy works as well as biographical material and archive items, which are regularly changed.
Smaller focus exhibitions with a thematic reference to Paul Klee and his work are shown in one room at a time.
Rose Wylie. Flick and Float presents the nonconformist and fascinating work of the British artist Rose Wylie (b. 1934). She has won global recognition with her unique artistic practice and wide range of themes. Wylie’s large-format paintings are a mixture of figurative representation, abstraction and stories in pictures. Expressive, direct and filled with subversive humour, they bear witness to the artist’s engagement with pop culture, literature, history and personal experiences.
ngagement with pop culture, literature, history and personal experiences. Wylie’s artistic language is deliberately simple, and recalls the aesthetic of ‘Bad Painting’ and Post-Pop. With works from the last thirty years, the exhibition provides an insight into the untamed œuvre of an artist who overcomes conventional boundaries and occupies a unique place in the contemporary art scene. Individual works are also being painted specially for the exhibition in Bern, and shown to the public for the first time.
Curators: Fabienne Eggelhöfer
Gego (Gertrud Goldschmidt, 1912 in Hamburg–1994 in Caracas, Venezuela) was a German-Venezuelan artist and pioneer of abstraction in Latin America. She is known among other things for her drawings and her filigree, net-like sculptures and installations, which she called Reticuláreas – abstract drawings in space.
Gego, born Gertrud Louise Goldschmidt, studied architecture and engineering in Stuttgart during the Nazi period, and was strongly influenced by the ideas of the Bauhaus and modern architecture. Shortly after graduation she had to flee Germany because of her Jewish origins, and emigrated to Venezuela, where she devoted herself to art and teaching. The exhibition in the Zentrum Paul Klee is Gego’s first solo exhibition in Switzerland, and shows drawings, watercolours, prints and selected sculptures by the artist.
Curator: Martin Waldmeier
Fokus. Gego (Gertrud Goldschmidt) is part of the permanent exhibition Kosmos Klee.
The permanent exhibition Kosmos Klee. The Collection offers visitors a chronological overview of Klee's artistic oeuvre and presents around seventy works as well as biographical material and archive items, which are regularly changed.
Smaller focus exhibitions with a thematic reference to Paul Klee and his work are shown in one room at a time.
Anni Albers (1889–1994) is one of the most important figures in the art and design of the 20th century. Her creative and experimental career began in the 1920s in the Bauhaus, where she took lessons with Paul Klee.
She emigrated to the USA in 1933, establishing herself there as a weaver, textile designer and visual artist. Aside from her painterly woven works, which can be seen as autonomous art works, Albers devoted herself to the development of new textiles for buildings and interior spaces, so-called ‘utility objects’. She viewed weaving as the most progressive form of modern architectural thought. The exhibition focuses on the connection between textile and architecture, between weaving and building. With her deep understanding of material and its applications, Albers’s work is highly contemporary and relevant given present-day challenges in terms of energy and material resources. It is here that we can see her great significance both as a designer, theorist and innovator in the field of textiles and as a unique artist.
Curators: Fabienne Eggelhöfer and Brenda Danilowitz
The exhibition is a cooperation between the Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, and the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Bethany CT, in collaboration with ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum.
