Franz Gertsch (1930-2022) is seen as a Swiss pioneer of photorealism and a master of the modern woodcut. The retrospective Franz Gertsch. Blow-Up, shown in two parts in the Kunstmuseum Bern and the Museum Franz Gertsch, offers an overview of an artistic career lasting more than sixty years, including monumental paintings of the youth and music scene from the 1970s, iconic portraits of women from the 1980s, family paintings and portraits of artist friends, epic landscapes and images of nature.

In the Kunstmuseum Bern the focus is on the years between 1956 and 2021, creating familiar insights, but also illuminating new aspects and perspectives for the reception of Gertsch’s works. The exhibition shows Gertsch’s stylistic development, and goes on to reveal the thematic lines and cross-connections within his œuvre. These include the relationship between humanity and nature, as well as the role of photography in painting, which are today acquiring a new significance in the context of ecological and humanitarian crises and in the age of the selfie. 

Curator: Dr. Kathleen Bühler

Assistant curator: Nina Liechti

Exhibition in the Museum Franz Gertsch 

19.9.2026–28.2.2027

The Franz Gertsch Museum concentrates on selected paintings and themes from the years between 1970 and 2022, with a particular focus on the models Patti Smith, Luciano Castelli and Irene Straub. Gertsch made a total of five portraits of the rock poet Patti Smith, and thirteen of Luciano Castelli between 1971 and 1977. Irene Staub was part of Luciano Castelli’s circle, and was known as a high-class prostitute in Zurich under the name of ‘Lady Shiva’. Other works in the exhibition include large-format paintings of the models Johanna (1983–1985) and Silvia (1988–2004), as well as the important landscape subjects of the forest path (Campiglia Marittima), grasses and the sea as well as selected woodcuts. 

Curator Museum Franz Gertsch: Anna Wesle 

An exhibition of Kunstmuseum Bern and Museum Franz Gertsch in cooperation with Louisiana Museum of Modern Art Humlebæk and Deichtorhallen Hamburg.

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Featuring some 70 works, the exhibition Journey into Freedom. Capri – Skagen – Monte Verità sheds light on the phenomenon of the European artists’ colony in Europe between 1830 and 1930.

In an age of social upheavals resulting from the industrial revolution, artists explored alternative lifestyles and social utopias away from the large cities, and brought subjects such as women’s emancipation, queer identity and the connection with nature centre-stage. The exhibition presents three selected dream destinations and allows visitors to experience the artistic breakthrough into a free and communal future. 

It confronts us with romantic and idealised depictions of landscape alongside naturalistic – sometimes brutal – images of the everyday life of workers, particularly fishermen. At the same time, it brings together art-historical and social issues with surprising contemporary relevance.

Co-Curators: Livia Wermuth and Andreas Schwab

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A blue horse is gazing into the distance; a yellow cow is leaping through the air: anyone who has seen the vibrant paintings of Franz Marc (1880–1916) will remember them. With Franz Marc. The Quest for a Better World, the Kunstmuseum Bern presents the first comprehensive solo exhibition of the artist and co-founder of the Der Blaue Reiter in Switzerland. 

Marc’s works are among the key works of German Expressionism, and some of the most noted masterpieces of modern art. Featuring around eighty paintings, works on paper, and sculptures from national and international collections, the exhibition traces the artist’s career, which lasted only a few years but was extraordinarily productive, in all its diversity. It thus offers a unique overview of his œuvre – from the early iconic depictions of animals to the late, increasingly abstract compositions. Marc’s animal paintings, in particular, continue to exert a powerful aesthetic and emotional impact to this day: they evoke the existential and fateful dimensions of our existence and thus refer to a profound human longing for a connection with nature. 

Curator: Livia Wermuth

Assistant curators : Kaja Pawelek, Michelle Fritschi

The exhibition is a cooperation of the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, and the Kunstmuseum Bern. 

Becoming part of another world, creating a new identity for oneself, merging with a utopia or avoiding a dystopia: With [ENTER HERE]. Digital Worlds, the Kunstmuseum Bern is showing for the first time a thematic exhibition on immersive digital art.

en positions from international artists and artists’ collectives from the past seven years provide an insight into artistic creation with new media such as video games, video projections or hybrid installations. They design different worlds, create new identities, long for alternative life forms or suggest possible ways out of social and ecological crises. 

The works on display reflect the variety of approaches with which artists open up new spaces and test out new identities in an everyday life shaped by technology and digitality. The universes thus produced create the possibility of immersive engagement with central questions of our time and serve as tools to rethink digital and physical realities. 

Curator: Nina Liechti

It was not until the age of 35 that Adolf Wölfli (1864–1930) turned to art at Waldau Psychiatric Hospital. In his small cell there, the traumatised handyman worked tirelessly as a draftsman, composer and writer on his Skt. Adolf=Riesen=Schöpfung, which would unfold over 25’000 pages. 

He weaved coloured pencil drawings, lines of music and whirling prose together into an intoxicating work of art, without a millimetre of free space. Wölfli thus created an œuvre unique in the art of the 20th century, whose poetic power continues to move us to this day. The cabinet-like show by the Adolf Wölfli-Stiftung condenses this powerful universe into an intimate encounter.

Curator: Hilar Stadler

Cabaret, nature, work, everyday life – in his paintings, French artist Camille Bombois (1883–1970) devoted himself to the great scenes of human life. He thus created a pictorial world between heightened reality and imagination. His works combine careful observation with dreamlike landscape compositions, and are marked by a particular narrative power. 

With Camille Bombois. The Spectacle of Life, the Kunstmuseum Bern is showing the first major exhibition devoted to Camille Bombois in Switzerland. Some eighty paintings give a comprehensive insight into Bombois’ diverse œuvre. In thematic chapters, the exhibition develops the different facets of his work, from cabaret scenes via landscapes and everyday situations to representations of labour, physicality and nature. The presentation invites visitors to rediscover an artist whose unique pictorial language remains fascinating to this day. 

Curator: Raphael Gygax

The collection of the Anne-Marie and Victor Loeb-Stiftung includes around 350 outstanding works by Swiss and international artists from Constructivism and the post-war avant-garde. It has been held as a permanent loan at the Kunstmuseum Bern since 1980. 

The nearly thirty works on display, by artists such as Jean Tinguely, Louise Nevelson and George Rickey, offer compelling testimony to the openness and passion with which Anne-Marie and Victor Loeb followed the artistic developments of their time and built their collection What once came about in dialogue with the contemporary art scene now opens itself up once again to the dialogue between the works and with the audience. 

Curator: Nadine Franci

Ferdinand Hodler, Cuno Amiet, Giovanni Giacometti: together they form the big three in the Swiss artistic firmament of the late 19th and early 20th century. 

The exhibition of works from the collection, Hodler, Amiet, Giacometti & Co. Aspects of Swiss Modern Art from the Collection, shows which other artists, aside from these three prominent figures, were also part of the Swiss art scene, and the Bern art scene in particular, during the first decades of the 20th century. It presents visitors with a tour d’horizon that combines the big names with Swiss modern artists that are due for rediscovery. 

Curator: Anne-Christine Strobel