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.
Kurt Schwitters (1887–1948) is one of the most significant representatives of the international artistic avant-garde of the interwar years. He was a wilful crossover artist, who created an unmistakeable synthesis of art, design and literature in his art.
At the centre of his work was the principle of collage as an attempt to create new contexts of meaning from the contradictory everyday reality of modern life, and to counter the chaos of the world with a poetic order.
The exhibition shows Schwitters’ multi-layered work of dadaist collages and his reconstructed walk-through ‘Merzbau’ in Hanover to naturalistic portraits and landscape paintings. It illuminates his creative resilience in exile and his role as an independent artist and author between the different trends of modern art. With Schwitters: On the Fringes of the Avant-Garde the Zentrum Paul Klee is showing the first comprehensive exhibition on Kurt Schwitters in Switzerland for twenty years.
Curator: Martin Waldmeier
Curatorial assistant: Josephine Rechberg
In collaboration with the Sprengel Museum Hannover and the Kurt und Ernst Schwitters Stiftung, Hannover
When painting and drawing, Paul Klee often used both sides of the picture support, whether paper, cardboard or canvas. In around 600 of a total of 9,600 works, there are drawings, watercolours or paintings on the reverse side.
This remarkable phenomenon extends over all the phases of the artist’s career. Often the versos are more than mere supports for rejected ideas. They are part of an open, continuing working process, in which Klee connected the recto and verso in terms of form and content, as well as pictorially. The exhibition invites the viewer to discover this hidden treasure.
Curator: Marie Kakinuma
Fokus. Klee's versos is part of the permanent exhibition Kosmos Klee. The Collection
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.
The German artist Anne Loch (1946–2014), who lived partly in Switzerland from the 1980s onwards, played with the conventions of representation and plumbed the limits of painting: in monumental paintings of mountains, flowers, animals and insects, she creates a quiet tension.
What seems at first glance idyllic and even clichéd, on closer inspection eludes unambiguous description. Boundaries between the figurative and the abstract, between painting and drawing, between reality and dream are blurred. Line, colour, plane and the quest for the correct relationships between these fundamental elements of painting step into the foreground. With some 70 works, the exhibition at the Zentrum Paul Klee pursues Anne Loch’s engagement with the medium of painting and the dissolution of her motifs.
Curator: Amélie Joller
Florence Henri was a real globetrotter of modernism. Born in New York in 1893, she lived with her family in Paris, Munich, Vienna and finally the Isle of Wight in England. As a young woman she stayed with her aunt in Rome, where she studied piano at the conservatoire.
During a stay in Berlin in the 1910s she met the avant-garde art scene and began to study painting. She later continued her studies at the Académie Moderne in Paris. In April 1927, she attended the Bauhaus in Dessau, where Lucia Moholy-Nagy encouraged her to take up photography. Early in 1928, she abandoned painting entirely, and over the following years devoted herself to experimental photography.
Curators: Roberto Lacarbonara und Giovanni Battista Martini
Fokus. Florence Henri (1893–1982)is part of the permanent exhibition Kosmos Klee. The Collection
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.
In the first half of the 20th century, the Brazilian artist Roberto Burle Marx (1909–1994) revolutionised landscape architecture by transferring compositional principles from painting and music to nature.
While his plans resemble abstract paintings, he integrated sculptures as well as three-dimensional and colourful wall surfaces into his landscape projects. In his paintings one encounters abstract plants and the play of light in the treetops. As a painter, graphic artist, sculptor, jewellery designer, stage and costume designer, environmental activist and collector, he participated – in the spirit of the Brazilian avant-garde – in the cultural appropriation and re-evaluation of what was considered ‘Brazilian’. In his parks, for example, he used native plant varieties, even though these were held to be inferior, and advocated for the study and protection of Brazilian flora.
Curator: Fabienne Eggelhöfer
Curatorial assistant: Myriam Dössegger
An exhibition organised and curated by the Zentrum Paul Klee and Fundación Juan March in partnership with the Instituto Burle Marx and the support from Sítio Burle Marx.
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.
In the ‘Fokus Room’ we organize small exhibitions with a thematic focus on particular aspects of Paul Klee's work as well as with artists and topics with surprsing references to Klee's œuvre.
![Paul Klee, Ohne Titel (Blume und Schlange) [Rückseite von Kind und Drache], um 1940 Aquarell und Kleisterfarbe auf Gipsgrundierung auf Karton 33,5 × 42,5 cm Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, Schenkung Livia Klee © Zentrum Paul Klee](/fileadmin/_processed_/a/7/csm_09_Klee_Ohne-Titel_Rueckseite_b33e2e9842.webp "Paul Klee, Ohne Titel (Blume und Schlange) [Rückseite von Kind und Drache], um 1940 Aquarell und Kleisterfarbe auf Gipsgrundierung auf Karton 33,5 × 42,5 cm Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, Schenkung Livia Klee © Zentrum Paul Klee")
