Zentrum Paul Klee

The permanent exhibition Kosmos Klee. The Collection offers visitors a chronological survey of Klee’s artistic career and presents some seventy works as well as biographical material and items from the archive that are regularly changed.

In this context of the new permanent exhibition we are devoting one FOKUS room to smaller exhibitions with a thematic reference to Paul Klee and his work.

FOKUS: Hamed Abdalla (1917–1985)

For the first time in Switzerland, an exhibition is devoted to the Egyptian artist Hamed Abdalla (1917–1985), pioneer of modern Egyptian art, who lived in Europe from the 1950s. He engaged intensively with Paul Klee and experimented with various techniques, with Arabic calligraphy forming a central starting point. As an artist of the Hurufiyya movement, which developed new artistic possibilities out of the Arabic alphabet, he invented his own ‘creative words’ by combining abstraction and human forms. 

Curators: Zamân Books & Curating: Morad Montazami, Madeleine de Colnet

In her work, the British New York-based painter and film maker Sarah Morris (b. 1967) combines abstract painting with issues around modernity and power.

Morris is interested in the systems that run through our lives in modern society, and how they are manifested in different cities and cultural contexts – from the architecture of large corporations via traffic to the digital infrastructure. The exhibition offers a comprehensive overview of the artist’s career, including her work in film. The fifteen films that will be shown in cinema boxes in the exhibition are devoted to the dynamic of global metropolises such as Los Angeles or Beijing, and blend into an artistic unity with the paintings.

Curator: Martin Waldmeier

From Mies van der Rohe to Lisbeth Sachs

Paul Klee's art and visual thinking were influential for numerous architects. Many acquired one or more works by the artist. Mies van der Rohe owned the largest collection. Lina Bo Bardi and Aldo van Eyck acquired one of Paul Klee's many imaginary architectural representations, a selection of which is presented in the exhibition.

Carlo Scarpa designed the Klee exhibition at the Venice Biennale in 1948 and subsequently adopted Paul Klee's artistic compositional principles. The post-war generation of architects, including Aldo Rossi and the Swiss architect Lisbeth Sachs, also began to study Klee's writings and were particularly interested in Klee's process-orientated work. Organic forms in nature became a central reference for her designs and dissolved the rectangular rigour. A special focus is on the works of Lisbeth Sachs, who has been little known to date.

Curators: Fabienne Eggelhöfer, Osamu Okuda

Fokus. Architecture with 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 changed regularly.

Smaller focus exhibitions with a thematic reference to Paul Klee and his work are shown in one room at a time.

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 permanent exhibition Kosmos Klee. The Collection offers visitors a chronological survey of Klee’s artistic career and presents some seventy works as well as biographical material and items from the archive that are regularly changed.

In this context of the new permanent exhibition we are devoting one FOKUS room to smaller exhibitions with a thematic reference to Paul Klee and his work.

FOKUS: Journals of the Avant-Garde

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.

Curator: Martin Waldmeier