Exhibition focuses on sculpture from the Second World War to the present

Exhibition "Sculpture on the Move 1946-2016", Kunstmuseum Basel | New building, ground floor, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, "Untitled" (USA Today), 1990, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Gift of Dannheisser Foundation, Jeff Koons, Rabbit, 1986, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, part donation from Stefan T . Edlis and H. Gael Neeson, 2000.21;Charles Ray, Male Mannequin, 1990, The Broad Art Foundation, Robert Gober, Playpen, 1986 Daros Collection, Switzerland, Katharina Fritsch, commodity rack with brains, 1989/1997, Emanuel Hoffmann Foundation, deposited in the Public Art Collection Basel 1997. © Kunstmuseum Basel, Photo: Gina Folly.

BASEL.- The three-part exhibition Painting on the Move of 2002 was held not just in the affiliated Kunstmuseum and Museum für Gegenwartskunst but in Kunsthalle Basel, too. With its panoply of painterly explorations of the world, it traced a vast arc from the early twentieth century to the dawn of the new millennium. 

Conceived as a curatorial counterpart, Sculpture on the Move focuses on sculpture from the end of the Second World War to the present. This major exhibition to marks the inauguration of Kunstmuseum Basel’s new building visualizing the extraordinary dynamism underlying sculpture’s development, revealing how the classical notions defining it came unstuck, how it ventured beyond the representation of visible reality and became abstract, how it took on the banality of the everyday object, and how even after breaking out of its spatial and conceptual confines it regrouped to revisit the figurative. The selection of works from Kunstmuseum Basel’s own collection, flanked by important loans from international museums and private collections, promises an exhibition of exceptional density and diversity. 

Conceived as a curatorial counterpart, Sculpture on the Move focuses on sculpture from the end of the Second World War to the present. This major exhibition to marks the inauguration of Kunstmuseum Basel’s new building visualizing the extraordinary dynamism underlying sculpture’s development, revealing how the classical notions defining it came unstuck, how it ventured beyond the representation of visible reality and became abstract, how it took on the banality of the everyday object, and how even after breaking out of its spatial and conceptual confines it regrouped to revisit the figurative. The selection of works from Kunstmuseum Basel’s own collection, flanked by important loans from international museums and private collections, promises an exhibition of exceptional density and diversity. © Kunstmuseum Basel, Photo: Gina Folly.

The exhibition begins with some late works of the great Constantin Brancusi and Alberto Giacometti in the top-lit galleries on the second floor of the new building designed by the architects Christ & Gantenbein. The loosely chronological sequence that follows highlights various aspects of the medium between the 1940s and 1970s, as exemplified by the works of Alexander Calder, Jean Arp, Max Bill, Henry Moore, Louise Bourgeois, Pablo Picasso, Eduardo Chillida, David Smith, Jean Tinguely, Claes Oldenburg, Duane Hanson, John Chamberlain, Donald Judd, Carl Andre, Joseph Beuys, Mario Merz, Bruce Nauman, Eva Hesse, Richard Serra, and Robert Smithson.  

Donald Judd, Untitled, 1969. Purchase 1975, Kunstmuseum Basel © Kunstmuseum Basel, Photo: Stefano Graziani