Kunstmuseum Bern

The Kunstmuseum Bern is showing the most comprehensive retrospective so far of the work of Tracey Rose (b. 1974). The South African artist has been a radical voice in the international art world since the mid-1990s. Her works engage with postcolonialism, gender, sexuality, racism and apartheid.

At the centre is the power of performance art and the body, which Tracey Rose sees as a place of protest, rage, resistance and discourse. Her performances have examined and critically commented on central experiences in the transition to a postcolonial world. Her work is often described as absurd, anarchic, provocative and carnivalesque. The artist captures her sensational performance practice in various media such as photography, video, installation and drawing. The retrospective shows works from the period between 1990 and 2021.

Curators: Koyo Kouoh, Tandazani Dhlakama, in collaboration with Kathleen Bühler

Cooperation: The exhibition has been organised by Zeitz MOCAA (Capetown, South Africa).

Reading girls have been and remain a sign that a society invests in the education of women and thus seeks to improve their economic and social status. Albert Anker (1831–1910) was not only concerned with the education of children as a politician; as a painter he also often represented girls and young women reading and writing.

His political and artistic engagement with the issue can be seen as a contribution to equal rights for women in Switzerland. This thesis, along with selected loans and works from the Museum’s own collection, form the Kunstmuseum Bern’s focus on Anker to coincide with the opening of the Centre Albert Anker in Ins, Switzerland, which will take place on 7 June 2024. 

The exhibition comprises 13 paintings and 9 drawings.

Curator: Kathleen Bühler

The exhibition is dedicated to the outstanding work of Chaïm Soutine (1893–1943). His expressive works show shaky landscapes, slaughtered animals and people on the lowest rungs of society who were his models: Pages, chambermaids, cooks, altar boys.

His paintings focus on the existential and vulnerable dimension of existence and are, at the same time, pure artistic experiments. The monographic exhibition concentrates on the artist’s early masterpieces and focuses on the series that he made between 1919 and 1925.

Curator: Nina Zimmer

Cooperation: The exhibition is a collaboration between the Kunstmuseum Bern, K20, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek/Copenhagen.

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. Sillman sees her painting as drawing that aspires to film or poetry. Many of her explorations through drawing revolve around complete devotion to processes of transformation which are open to inversion, redesign and examination. At the centre of the exhibition is Sillman’s treatment of time, and its compression or expansion.

Her powerful and allusive œuvre is represented with selected groups of works from the last twenty years and put into a dialogue with the collection of the Kunstmuseum Bern. This dialogue is curated by the artist herself. After a highly acclaimed exhibition contribution at the Venice Biennale in 2022 as well as solo exhibitions in the Kunsthaus Bregenz (2015) and the Portikus in Frankfurt am Main (2016), this is the American artist’s largest institutional solo exhibition so far in Europe.

Curator: Kathleen Bühler

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

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