Mary Heilmann @ Hauser & Wirth Zurich - Works on Paper

Mary Heilmann. Works on Paper 

Hauser & Wirth Zurich

26 September – 20 December 2025

Mary Heilmann

Tea Garden, 1984

Watercolor on paper, 76.2 x 55.9 cm / 30 x 22 in

Photo: Thomas Müller

© Mary Heilmann

Courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth and 303 Gallery, New York

Mary Heilmann

Untitled Watercolor Study, ca. 1986-1988

Watercolor and pencil on paper, 12.7 x 17.5 cm / 5 x 6 7/8 in

Photo: Thomas Müller

© Mary Heilmann

Courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth and 303 Gallery, New York

Mary Heilmann returns to Hauser & Wirth’s Zurich gallery on Limmatstrasse with an exhibition of more than 30 drawings made between 1975 and 2005. Expanding on the artist’s exhibition of works on paper, ‘Daydream Nation’, at Hauser & Wirth New York last year, this presentation continues the recent in-depth exploration into Heilmann’s long-standing drawing practice and coincides with the release of a new publication from Hauser & Wirth Publishers, ‘Mary Heilmann. Works on Paper: 1973 – 2019’. 

Raised in San Francisco and Los Angeles, Mary Heilmann (b. 1940) completed a degree in literature, before receiving her M.A. in ceramics and sculpture at the University of California, Berkeley. Only after moving to New York in 1968 did she begin to paint and in the early 1970s establish a drawing practice that continues to this day.  

Ranging from watercolor studies to paintings on paper in their own right, ‘Mary Heilmann. Works on Paper’ brings together a selection of rarely and never-before-seen drawings that fluctuate in scale and materiality. The exhibition is a celebration of Heilmann’s talent for translating complex images and ideas into deceptively simple geometric forms and abstract gestural marks.  

Mary Heilmann

Untitled Watercolor Study, ca. 1983-86

Watercolor and graphite on paper, 17.8 x 12.7 cm / 7 x 5 in

Photo: Genevieve Hanson

© Mary Heilmann

Courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth and 303 Gallery, New York

Mary Heilmann

Untitled Watercolor Study, ca. 1987-1989

Watercolor and pencil on paper, 27.9 x 21.6 cm / 11 x 8 1/2 in

Photo: Genevieve Hanson

© Mary Heilmann

Courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth and 303 Gallery, New York

Many of Heilmann’s most well-known and admired series – Fans, Chairs, Serapes, Grids – are represented in the installation as are drawings that have related works in important European museum collections. 'Untitled Watercolor Study' (ca. 1983 – 1986) is one of two drawings in the exhibition that are part of a series of works by Heilmann in tribute to the Dutch painter Piet Mondrian that includes ‘M.’ (1985), a painting in the collection of the Museum Kunstpalast. ‘Islands’, (1988), one of the larger watercolors on view, was made after ‘Laurens’ (1986), an oil on canvas in the collection of the De Pont Museum. 

The works on view not only demonstrate Heilmann’s work serially but also her tendency to revisit and reimagine certain arrangements of form and color. Made 15 years apart, ‘Broken Study’ (2005) is a recompilation of an early red, black and white composition, ‘Untitled Watercolor Study’ (ca. 1989) and Heilmann’s web imagery seen in ‘Blue Net’ (1991).  

As an artist known for working across mediums and for installations that playfully combine disparate works, the exhibition also includes a selection of ceramic ‘Spots’ and sculptural chairs.  

Mary Heilmann: Works on Paper, 1973–2019

Text by Alexis Lowry, Jo Applin, Ilana Savdie

Hauser & Wirth Publishers

English Paperback, 26 x 20 cm; 152pp

16 September (UK, ROW & US)

An in-depth study of Mary Heilmann’s mesmerizing works on paper that explores drawing as a form of daydreaming and memory-making for the influential abstract painter. 

Mary Heilmann’s works on paper are suffused with the same sensibility as her influential abstract paintings, a casual playfulness animating a rigorous attention to form and colour, resulting in joyful, evocative geometries. Their suggestive power reflects Heilmann’s process of what she calls ‘daydreaming’: a conjuring of the sights, sounds, and events of past and future travels, the cyclical nature of memory informing her return to various motifs across nearly five decades of work. Edited and with an introduction by curator Alexis Lowry, ‘Mary Heilmann: Works on Paper, 1973 – 2019’ includes an essay by art historian Jo Applin and a personal reflection by painter Ilana Savdie, all together offering a compelling account of this previously underexamined aspect of Heilmann’s practice. 

Artist Mary Heilman

Considered one of the preeminent contemporary Abstract painters, Mary Heilmann is best known for incorporating a fusion of personal and cultural influences and craft traditions into an artistic practice including paintings, ceramics, and furniture. 

Mary Heilmann is the subject of two major institutional exhibitions, ‘Mary Heilmann. Starry Night’ at Dia Beacon in Beacon NY and ‘Mary Heilmann. Water Way’ at Guild Hall in East Hampton, NY both close in October 2025. On view at the Whitney Museum of American Art until January 2026 is ‘Mary Heilmann: Long Line,’ a site-specific installation that celebrates the 10th anniversary of the opening of the Whitney Museum’s downtown building.  

Her work is included in many prominent international collections, such as those of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany.

HAUSER & WIRTH ZURICH

Limmatstrasse 270, 8005 Zürich

www.hauserwirth.com

Joana Vasconcelos Exhibition in Switzerland @ Museo Comunale d’Arte Moderna, Ascona - "Flowers of my desire" Retrospective Exhibition

Joana Vasconcelos

Flowers of my desire

Museo Comunale d’Arte Moderna, Ascona, Switzerland

Through 23 November, 2025

Joana Vasconcelos

Portugal Offashion, 2008

Photo © Courtesy Atelier Joana Vasconcelos

Joana Vasconcelos

Hand-Made, 2008

Photo © Courtesy Atelier Joana Vasconcelos

The Museo Comunale d’Arte Moderna in Ascona presents JOANA VASCONCELOS’ first solo exhibition at a Swiss public institution. Born in Lisbon in 1971, Joana Vasconcelos is celebrated internationally, having participated in three editions of the Venice Biennale and exhibited in prominent venues worldwide. Notably, she is the first woman artist to present solo exhibitions at the Palace of Versailles and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao.

This extensive retrospective, tailored specifically for the museum’s unique spaces and curated by Mara Folini and Alberto Fiz, includes more than 30 significant works spanning installations, wall pieces, paintings, drawings, videos, and publications, tracing her artistic evolution over the last three decades.

Renowned for monumental sculptures and immersive installations, Vasconcelos transforms ordinary objects, reshaping notions of art, craft, and design. She bridges private life and public spaces, blending popular culture with high art. With humor and subtlety, she explores femininity, consumer culture, and collective memory.

“Ascona’s Municipal Museum is the perfect venue for Joana Vasconcelos’s first public exhibition in Switzerland,” states museum director Mara Folini. “Her work deeply resonates with themes of femininity, aligning with our dedication to Marianne Werefkin, an influential early 20th-century European artist who anticipated Expressionism. Symbolically, Ascona now connects these two remarkable women artists, each defining her era.”

Curator Alberto Fiz adds, “The exhibition in Ascona merges spectacular visual elements with intimate and thought-provoking insights, enabling audiences to grasp the complexity of Vasconcelos’s approach. Her vibrant interaction with everyday objects presents an innovative stylistic language, navigating from the Baroque toward a dynamic new understanding of postmodernism, continually challenging conventional boundaries.”

Occupying both floors of the museum, the exhibition provides an immersive, comprehensive journey through Vasconcelos’s oeuvre. Visitors are invited to leave preconceptions behind and begin their experience with Wash and Go (1998), an installation reminiscent of a colorful car wash, symbolizing renewal. Immediately afterwards, visitors are faced with La Baronesa (2023), a monumental ten-meter-high textile sculpture arranged vertically that appears like a fluid deity and seems to envelop the entire building. The work is displayed differently depending on where it is exhibited. In this case, the Portuguese artist wanted to dedicate it to the “Baroness”, the name given to Marianne Werefkin, the Russian artist who founded Ascona’s museum, by her friends in reference to her noble lineage.

The exhibition shows the different sides of a multifaceted investigation spanning two decades of activity, where the artist creates a narrative that reflects the human soul in a progressive relationship between reason and emotion, between the Apollonian and the Dionysian. The rooms that can be visited in Ascona are secret rooms, linked by a thin red thread that allows visitors to follow a single storyline full of surprises.

On the first floor, visitors are greeted by the towering Red Independent Heart (2013), three meters high. Suspended on its axis, the artwork rotates in a circular motion evoking the cycles of life and eternal return, accompanied by the sound of three significant Fado songs, the Portuguese musical genre characterized by a poignant melancholy. The installation refers to the Heart of Viana, the traditional Portuguese sacred filigree jewel. However, in this case, upon closer inspection, the intricate pattern reveals red plastic forks, which become an alienating visual pattern, transforming everyday items into poetic visuals.

The intimate sphere with subtle erotic undertones is embodied in Flowers of My Desire, created in 1996 and restored in 2010 that gives the exhibition its title. The flowers of desire are lilac-colored feather dusters arranged within an organic form. The welcoming and pleasant appearance is contradicted by the external structure of the installation, which appears much more threatening with a series of metal spikes protruding from the mesh framework of an improbable bed.

Addressing consumerism and waste, Joana Vasconcelos presents Vista Interior (2000), a rectangular display case with white Venetian blinds containing an infinite number of dated objects, almost like a kiosk of memories, a contemporary Wunderkammer, in a progressive fetishistic and compulsive accumulation.

Also on display in Ascona are Cama Valium (1998), a large anti-anxiety bed made of Valium blister packs, and Brise (2001), a sofa where plastic flowers smell of mothballs, juxtaposing real and artificial elements. The olfactory element also characterizes Menu do Dia (2001), a particularly provocative work that denounces social issues. Perfumed furs with a pungent smell, alluding to the day’s meat-based menu, are arranged on the doors of old refrigerators, some dating back to the 1950s. The incongruous juxtaposition is striking: the cold of the refrigerators contrasts with the warmth of the furs that conceal the slaughter of animals.

Another theme often explored by Joana Vasconcelos is fashion, evident in Fashion Victims (2018), an installation in which two naked dolls with childlike faces and adolescent bodies are gradually covered with threads from spools activated by a motor. Little by little, the dolls’ faces disappear, their mouths are gagged and their legs tied to keep only their breasts and pubic areas visible. The video Portugal Offashion (2008) is also dedicated to fashion, in which the artist creates an ironic and original fashion show.

The artist’s works have the specific characteristic of interacting with space, blurring the boundaries between painting, sculpture, and architecture. This process also involved wall works, as can be seen in the series of rare compositions created between 1998 and 2003 in fiberglass and steel, which already developed three-dimensionality, expressing dissatisfaction with traditional abstraction. This led to the Crochet Painting series, which mixes textile art with sculpture and painting. Here, crochet work leaves the domestic sphere and becomes a powerful visual language loaded with meaning.

From this cycle, the exhibition features Miragem (2024), an impressive composition where shapes made of colored wool substitute traditional painting materials. Another highly ironic and provocative work is Big Booby (2018), which takes the form of a monumental wall sculpture. Made of crochet and padded fabric, it unmistakably depicts a large female breast, playing on voyeurism and innuendo.

An entire section of the exhibition is dedicated to Stupid Furniture (2021-2022), a project that involves repurposing outdated furniture or items destined to end up in attics. Joana Vasconcelos reactivates their energy by putting them back into circulation through a metamorphic process made possible by the insertion of colorful textile forms that envelop wooden or glass structures to create organic and multidimensional environments. The useless furniture emerges from its isolation to joyfully fill the space: these works have evocative, familiar, or sentimental titles such as La Sirenetta, Caldi Abbracci, Happy Hour, Acconciatura, and Lollobrigida, in homage to the Italian actress.

Many of Joana Vasconcelos’ works allow us to reinterpret objects in a totally innovative way. Duchampian ready-mades take on baroque forms, as in A Barroca (2014), which hides steel shower heads behind its opulent decorations. In another instance, a common sink is encased in an elegant, soft, and seductive plastic form that resembles something out of an 18th-century residence.

The exhibition is completed by a series of drawings, projects, and notes kept by Joana Vasconcelos in her Cahiers de Ma Vie, which can be read as personal diaries offering insight into her creative process.

The exhibition in Ascona takes place on the occasion of the centenary celebrations of the Locarno Peace Conference (1925), which contributed to a brief period of détente and cooperation between European nations after the First World War and the Treaty of Versailles. Joana Vasconcelos’ exhibition, based on the unifying roots of peoples and the exchange of knowledge towards a culture that promotes peace, is therefore fully part of the programme of events planned in the Locarno region to commemorate this important historical event.

Joana Vasconcelos

Flowers of my desire

Allemandi, 2025

Edited by: Mara Folini, Alberto Fiz

Paperback, 176 pp., 120 ill.

ISBN: 9788842227038

Image of book cover courtesy Allemandi

A catalog published by Allemandi features curatorial essays and an exclusive interview with Joana Vasconcelos.

MUSEI COMUNALI D'ARTE, ASCONA

Via Borgo 34, 6612 Ascona, Switzerland

www.museoascona.ch

JOANA VASCONCELOS. Flowers of My Desire 

Ascona (Switzerland), Museo Comunale d’Arte Moderna

June 15 – October 12, 2025 - Extended through 23 November, 2025

Warhol/Cutrone @ Galerie Gmurzynska, Zurich - Exhibition curated by James Hedges

Warhol/Cutrone

Galerie Gmurzynska, Zurich 

Through September 30, 2025

Warhol/Cutrone, an exhibition at Galerie Gmurzynska in Zurich, curated by James Hedges, juxtaposes Andy Warhol and Ronnie Cutrone, including paintings, drawings, and unique polaroids.

“Ronnie Cutrone was a painter and illustrator known for his Post-Pop imagery featuring cartoon characters like Woody the Woodpecker, Bart Simpson, and Bugs Bunny. Cutrone’s life and career make us remember New York at its creative apex. Reminiscing of another era, Cutrone said, “New York was elegant and sleazy. Now it’s a shopping mall for dot-commers. We need our crime rate back. I want my muggers and hookers back.” - James Hedges 

Andy Warhol and his right-hand man Ronnie Cutrone were the perceived masters of Manhattan in the 1970s and 1980s.

Working in synergistic fashion with Andy Warhol, Ronnie Cutrone helped execute some of the artist’s most iconic silkscreens. The duo’s collaborations countenance: Hand Tinted Flowers (ca. 1972), Invisible Sculpture (1972-83), Drag Queens/Ladies and Gentlemen (1974-75), Oxidation (Piss Paintings) (mid-late 1970s), Sex Parts/Torso (mid-1970s), Hammer & Sickle (1976-1977), Skulls (1976-77), Gems (1978), Shadow Paintings (1979), and Butcher Knives, Guns, Dollar Signs (1982).

With Andy Warhol one special focus of this exhibition is on his unique polaroids. Many of Warhol’s polaroid photographs have never been exhibited before and feature stars such as Grace Jones, Joseph Beuys, Keith Haring, Lou Reed and Candy Darling. Cutrone’s three-dimensional photographs of the Factory, shown publicly as well for the first time ever, give a historic and unprecedented peek into Warhol’s circle.

While with Ronnie Cutrone the focus of this exhibition is on his cartoon-infused painting, sculpture and drawings which shocked the New York scene in the 1980s. These works garnered him major solo shows in the inaugural Post-Pop wave, whilst igniting debates over the sanctity of the American symbols such as the flag and Mickey Mouse. After 1983, when Ronnie Cutrone left Warhol’s Factory, he perused his independent art career which reached great heights, including highly lauded museum exhibitions at the Whitney, the Museum of Modern Art, and the L.A. County Museum of Art, amongst many others.

“One thing I picked up from Andy: say loud and clear because if the WHOLE world gets it, the art world will get it too.” - Ronnie Cutrone 

Artist Ronnie Cutrone

Ronnie Cutrone (10 July, 1948 - 21 July, 2013) worked as Andy Warhol’s preeminent assistant from 1972 to 1982, though his collaborations with Warhol well preceded this. Ronnie Cutrone met Andy Warhol when he was only sixteen years old. Ronnie Cutrone, in 1966, joined the ranks of The Velvet Underground, formed by Lou Reed, John Cale, and Warhol, as a performer/dancer. Three years later, Ronnie Cutrone began writing as a columnist for Warhol’s Interview magazine, lauded for dovetailing reviews on avant-garde art exhibitions and features on celebrities, nightlife fixtures, and even politicians like Nancy Regan.

In 1972, Cutrone’s took up the mantle as Warhol’s apprentice, a post he maintained for the next decade. This was the zenith of Warhol’s international fame, and the Pop Art bastion took Ronnie Cutrone under his wing, entrusting Cutrone to, unlike Warhol’s other assistants, “work on the one thing he cared about the most, which was his art”. Although Ronnie Cutrone was, by this point, already burgeoning as a nascent artist of his own right—having assisted with programming John Giorno’s “Dial-A-Poem” at MoMA in the 1970 “Information” exhibition curated by Kynaston McShine.

Ronnie Cutrone’s responsibilities varied, ranging from conceptualizing Warhol’s subjects, mixing palettes, photographing live models and executing the silkscreen. Indeed, as the two artists ‘artistic relationship matured, the lines of influence became bi-directional. As philosopher, critic, and Warhol expert Arthur Danto observed in his biography, Andy Warhol (2009), “Cutrone played an important role in the later phase of Andy’s artistic career”.

During Cutrone’s time at Warhol’s Factory, he rubbed shoulders with Lou Reed, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Mick Jagger, Grace Jones, Lucio Amelio, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Fred Hughes, VictorHugo, Paul Morrisey, Gerard Malanga, Anjelica Huston, Debbie Harry, Salvador Dali and Alice Cooper, amongst others. After long days and nights of helping Warhol at the Factory, Ronnie Cutrone would frequent artist hubs like Max’s Kansas City, drinking “all night with bob Rauschenberg, Larry Rivers, Malcolm Morlye and Robert Smithson” or unwinding at the Mudd Club.

GALERIE GMURZYNSKA

Paradeplatz 2, Zurich

www.gmurzynska.com

Warhol/Cutrone @ Galerie Gmurzynska, Zurich, June 14 – September 30, 2025

Ghosts Exhibition @ Kunstmuseum Basel - Visualizing the Supernatural

Ghosts

Visualizing the Supernatural

Kunstmuseum Basel

September 20, 2025 – March 8, 2026 

Angela Deane 

All Of Us, 2025

Painted-over photograph, 8.89 x 8.89 cm

Image Courtesy of Angela Deane

© Angelina Deane

Tony Oursler

Fantasmino, 2017

Acrylic resin on canvas and 

digital hardware with moving image

46.99 x 21.59 x 17.78 cm

Collection of Tony Oursler

Photo by Andrea Guermani

Image Courtesy of Tony Oursler 

William Blair Bruce

The Phantom Hunter, 1888

Oil on canvas, 151.1 x 192.1 cm

Art Gallery of Hamilton. Bruce Memorial, 1914

Benjamin West

Saul and the Witch of Endor, 1777

Oil on canvas, 50.5 x 65.1 cm

Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT

Bequest of Clara Hinton Gould

Ghosts seem to be everywhere. Visual culture teems with specters, from Hollywood blockbusters like Ghostbusters (1984) to indie films such as All of Us Strangers (2023). They haunt screens, theater stages, and pages: literature, folklore, and myth are saturated with spirits that refuse to leave us in peace.

They have also always haunted art. As entities of the in-between, ghosts are mediators between worlds, between above and below, life and death, horror and humor, good and evil, visible and invisible. Any attempt to depict, record, or communicate with them thus offers a conceptual challenge and an emotional thrill.

This fall and winter, the Kunstmuseum Basel dedicates an extensive exhibition to these unfathomable entities. With over 160 works and objects created during the past 250 years, Ghosts. Visualizing the Supernatural explores the rich visual culture associated with ghosts that took shape in the Western hemisphere in the nineteenth century—when science, spiritualism, and popular media began to intersect in new ways, inspiring art and artists ever since.

Today, the nineteenth century is mostly regarded as a golden age of rationality, science, and technology but it was also a high season for the belief in ghosts and apparitions. In the second half of the century, ghosts became a tool for probing the emerging contours of the psyche and helped open new paths into people’s inner lives. The Romantic era produced an appetite for spectacles and marvels, and a belief in spirits was flanked by innovations in technology, including in the technologies of illusion (such as the theatrical technique, Pepper’s Ghost).

Edouard Isidore Buguet

Women with the spirit of her husband, ca. 1873-1875

Albumen silver print, ca. 8.2 x 5 cm; 10.5 x 6.3 cm (With border)

Collection of The College of Psychic Studies, London

Photo: The College of Psychic Studies, London

Staveley Bulford

Spirit photograph, 1921

Silver gelatine print mounted on card

15.9 x 12.5 cm; 30.3 x 25.4 cm (With mount)

Collection of The College of Psychic Studies, London

Photo: The College of Psychic Studies, London

The invention of photography around 1830 had led to the rise of spirit photography with important proponents such as William H. Mumler in the United States and, later, William Hope in England; their photographs, which seemed to make loved ones reappear, held the promise of a life after death and became a notable influence on what we imagine ghosts to look like, even today. Munich “ghost baron” Albert von Schrenck-Notzing—arguably the most famous parapsychologist—combined the novel technical means of photography with a quasi-scientific approach and intended to document the supernatural apparitions produced in his mediumistic seances. (His seances were attended and witnessed, on several occasions, by none other than the writer Thomas Mann).

While spirit photography is thus a central theme of the show, the writings and pictures created by spiritualist mediums to record their direct contact with the world of ghosts offer a variation on the broader theme of communication. Given the close connection of ghosts and states of psychological distress, the exhibition also takes a close interest in hauntings, when ghosts inhabit spaces. It follows these trails and developments as they originated in Western culture in the nineteenth century and stays largely focused on artists who drew inspiration from the resulting diverse visual traces and ghostly narratives. In doing so, it gleefully branches out into bodies of images beyond fine art, whose influence on artists in the twentieth century is demonstrated in the second half of the exhibition.

The exhibition and accompanying magazine-style publication were prepared in close consultation with two expert advisors—Andreas Fischer of the Freiburg IGPP (Institute for frontier areas of psychology and mental health), a leading authority on spirit photography and materialization phenomena, and British art historian Susan Owens, author of The Ghost: A Cultural History (2017), who has aptly called ghosts “humanity’s shadows”. The project traces this human element, therefore excluding angels, nature spirits, demons, and the like. Instead, it turns a spotlight on the theme’s poetic potential, its power to inspire, and the function of ghosts as a metaphor sustaining critical responses to the contemporary world, often addressing things that cannot be repressed.

The fact that such manifestations interact continually with our collective imagination—our cultural unconscious, even—is what makes the ghost such a powerful and enduring figure and the exhibition a surprising, fun, and thought-provoking journey. The scenography, intended to help open the senses to atmospheric changes and liminal experiences, was conceived by Alicja Jelen and Clemens Müller of please don’t touch (Dortmund).

Curator: Eva Reifert

KUNSTMUSEUM BASEL | Neubau

www.kunstmuseumbasel.ch

Kosmos Klee. The Collection @ Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern - Permanent Exhibition with some 80 changing works from the collection

Kosmos Klee. The Collection

Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern 

Permanent Exhibition

Paul and Lily Klee with the cat Bimbo, 

Kistlerweg 6, Bern, 1935

Photo: Fee Meisel

Paul Klee

Ohne Titel (Villa am Langensee) 

[Untitled (Villa at the Langensee)], 1896

Watercolour on paper, 9,9 × 15 cm

Private collection, Switzerland, 

deposit at the Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern

Paul Klee

Ohne Titel (Rückenakt) [Nude from Behind], 1902

Pencil on paper on cardboard, 32,5 × 28,5 cm

Private collection, Switzerland, 

deposit at the Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern

The dynamic permanent exhibition devoted to Paul Klee invites visitors to immerse themselves in the life and work of this important modern artist. With some 80 changing works from the collection, Kosmos Klee offers a chronological survey of Klee’s artistic career. Biographical and archival material provide an insight into his life and time. In addition, the ‘focus room’ offers a space for smaller exhibitions devoted to individual aspects of Klee’s work, or contributions to the artist’s global reception.

Paul Klee

In den Häusern v. St. Germain 

[ In the Houses of St. Germain], 1914, 110

Watercolour on paper on cardboard

15,5 × 15,9/16,3 cm

Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, donation of Livia Klee

Paul Klee

Tunesische Scizze [Tunisian Sketch], 1914, 212

Watercolour and pencil on paper on cardboard

17,9 × 12,2 cm

Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, donation of Livia Klee

Paul Klee

Ohne Titel (Fabrikanlage) 

[Untitled (Factory Plant)], 1922

Watercolour and pencil on paper on cardboard

10 × 8,9 cm

Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, donation of Livia Klee

Zentrum Paul Klee: The collection

The Zentrum Paul Klee is the world’s most important centre for research into Paul Klee’s life and work, and has one of the most significant collections of the artist’s drawings, watercolours and paintings. Paul Klee was primarily a draughtsman, which is why 80% of the collection of the Zentrum Paul Klee consists of works on paper, matching the collected works. Because of the fragility of the works as well as the large size and diversity of the collection, only parts of it can be displayed at once. Paul Klee enjoyed experimenting, not only in terms of content and form but also technically, using light-sensitive paints, inks and papers. For that reason the works need periods of rest between periods on display.

Paul Klee

Karneval im Gebirge 

[Carnival in the Mountains], 1924, 114

Watercolour on primed paper on cardboard

24 × 31,3 cm

Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern

Paul Klee

Fische im Kreis [Fishes in a Circle], 1926, 140

Oil and tempera on primed muslin on cardboard

42 × 43 cm

Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, donation of Livia Klee

Paul Klee

Nordzimmer [North Room], 1932, 17

Watercolour on paper on cardboard

37 × 55 cm

Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern

Kosmos Klee

With Kosmos Klee. The Collection the Zentrum Paul Klee offers visitors the opportunity to immerse themselves in Paul Klee’s life and work, as well as in the unique collection of the institution. Some 80 rotating and chronologically organised works provide an overview of Klee’s artistic development, from the highly detailed early works via tendencies towards abstraction and the discovery of colour, to the reduced pictorial language of the later work. Each decade of Klee’s artistic career is identified by a colour in the exhibition, allowing visitors to find their way intuitively around the space. Brief introductory texts, biographical photographs and films give deeper insights into the different phases of the work and Paul Klee’s engagement with the people around him.

Paul Klee

Doppel gesicht [Double face], 1933, 383

Coloured pastel and pencil on paper on cardboard

33 × 21 cm

Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, donation of Livia Klee

Paul Klee

Spätes Glühen [Late Glowing], 1934, 29

Pastel on damask on cardboard

26,8 x 32,5/34,3 cm

Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, donation of Livia Klee

Aside from his works, the Zentrum Paul Klee also preserves the artist’s archive. In the dynamic permanent exhibition, different treasures from the archive are presented, revealing the various aspects of Paul Klee’s life. His love of music is reflected in his record collection and the scores that Paul Klee, a gifted violinist, played from. Klee’s favourite music can be heard as part of a podcast in the exhibition. Parts of the artist’s collection of natural materials, including shells, stones and pages from herbariums, display Klee’s close relationship with nature and natural processes. Other objects include his watercolour box, his schoolbooks, scribbled over with drawings, as well as letters.

Curator: Fabienne Eggelhöfer

And Cover Star Klee, Paul Klee Artworks on Book Covers Exhibition, Through September 14, 2025.

ZENTRUM PAUL KLEE

Monument im Fruchtland 3, 3006 Bern 

zpk.org

Yee I-Lann @ Kunstmuseum Thun - "Mansau-Ansau" Exhibition

Yee I-Lann

MANSAU-ANSAU

Kunstmuseum Thun

23 August - 30 November 2025

Yee I-Lann 

Photograph by Wee Seng

Yee I-Lann 

TIKAR MEJA PLASTIK’ (2023) Detail

Woven by Aisyah Binti Ebrahim, Alisyah Binti Ebrahim, 

Ardih Binti Belasani, Dayang Binti Tularan, Darwisa

Binti Omar, Dela Binti Aniratih, Endik Binti Arpid, Erna, 

Fazlan Bin Tularan, Kinnuhong Gundasali, Kouh, Luisa

Binti Ebrahim, Makcik Lukkop Belatan, Malaya Binti Anggah, 

Ninna Binti Mursid, Noraidah Jabarah (Kak Budi),

Roziah Binti Jalalid, Sabiyana Binti Belasani, Sanah Belasani, 

Makcik Siti Aturdaya, Tasya binti Tularan and

Venice Foo Chau Xhien

Pandaus fabric, chemical dye, collected plastic waste

Variable format

Artist’s Collection

Image courtesy of Singapore Art Museum

Yee I-Lann 

Sulu Stories: The Ch’i-lin of Calauit, 2005

Archival pigment inkjet on Epson Premium Photo Luster

60.9 x 60.9 cm

Collection of Singapore Art Museum

Image courtesy of Singapore Art Museum

MANSAU-ANSAU at the Kunstmuseum Thun is the first major exhibition in Europe devoted to the work of YEE I-LANN. The multidisciplinary Malaysian artist explores traditional arts and crafts from a contemporary vantage point, delving into the narratives of her homeland and addressing the influences of colonialism and the persistence of Indigenous heritage and communities today.

Walking on and on, without a clear destination – this is an approximate translation of MANSAU-ANSAU from the language of the Indigenous Kadazan and Dusun tribes in Yee I-Lann’s homeland of Sabah, Malaysia. The notion of this venturing into the unknown can be frightening, as there is always the risk of getting lost. But it offers an equal chance of discovering something new. The travelling exhibition, shown at the Singapore Art Museum (SAM) from 24 December to 25 March and on view at the Kunstmuseum Thun starting 23 August, sheds light on issues involving art and colonialism from a fresh point of view.

The centrepiece of MANSAU-ANSAU is a mat woven from bamboo that forms the basis for people to sit down and commune together. The mat symbolises a space for intimacy and, in the artist’s view, offers a platform for local, democratic, feminist and social equality. “The mat is a place for storytelling and a way to discover new knowledge,” says Yee I-Lann.

In a broader context, Yee I-Lann (b. 1971, Kota Kinabalu, Sabah, Malaysian Borneo) examines in her work the complex geopolitical history of Southeast Asia. Working closely with a collective of women weavers from her homeland gives the artist a way to expose oppression using art and craft. In addition to textiles, the exhibition also features photographs, video works and sculptures dealing with themes such as collective reorganisation, realignment and imagination as strategies for the personal and collective future.

Yee I-Lann has ties to Switzerland: her great-granduncle was a mountaineer in Zermatt at the turn of the last century and was buried in the cemetery there after a fatal fall. The fact that she is presenting her first major European exhibition in Thun, in an environment that displays “similar forms and a similar strength” to her homeland, is the result of a chance discovery. Helen Hirsch, Director of the Kunstmuseum Thun and curator of the exhibition, became aware of the Malaysian artist at Art Unlimited in Basel in 2022. “I was captivated by her independent, multidisciplinary and multi-layered form of expression and her respectful attitude towards the local communities she works with,” says Helen Hirsch. Yee I-Lann always makes sure to include the names of the weavers on the labels for her works, something that distinguishes her from many other artists who have their textile works woven anonymously, for example in Morocco or South America. “She collaborates with the weavers on an equal basis.”

Yee I-Lann 

A map of Mansau-Ansau, 2024 (Detail)

Woven by Lili Naming and Shahrizan Bin Juin

Split bamboo pus (Schizostachyum pilosum S.Dransf.) weave, 

Multifilla Matt Sealant, 91 x 183 cm

Artist’s Collection

Image courtesy of Singapore Art Museum

Yee I-Lann

Installation view of Yee I-Lann’s Picturing Power (2013) 

Giclée print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag, Ultra Smooth Fine Art

Variable format

Collection of Singapore Art Museum

Image courtesy of Singapore Art Museum

The exhibition includes works from the Singapore Art Museum’s collection, including early photo collage series (Sulu Stories [2005], Picturing Power [2013]) as well as a range of woven works, from batik on silk (Orang Besar series [2010]) to split bamboo (Tepo Putih [2019], Tika-a-gagah [2018-19]). Yee I-Lann’s commitment to deconstructing relationships and her incorporation of diverse symbols and aesthetics is evident in works that transcend time and media. All the while, however, her oeuvre is distinctly rooted in material and communal realities, especially those of Indigenous peoples.

Curator: Helen Hirsch, in collaboration with the Singapore Art Museum (SAM)

KUNSTMUSEUM THUN

Thunerhof, Hofstettenstrasse 14, 3602 Thun

www.kunstmuseumthun.ch

"Cover Star Klee" - Paul Klee Artworks on Book Covers Exhibition @ Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, Switzerland, Curated by Dieter Roelstraete

Cover Star Klee

Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern

7 June - 14 September 2025

Book covers illustrated with works by Paul Klee

Photo courtesy Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern

Why do so many 20th-century books – hundreds, if not thousands – about philosophy, psychotherapy or critical theory have Paul Klee’s art on the cover? Within the context of the dynamic permanent exhibition "Kosmos Klee. The Collection", the Zentrum Paul Klee devotes itself to this question. Featuring just over 150 books and 27 original drawings and paintings from the collection of the Zentrum Paul Klee, the Fokus exhibition honours the fascinating influence of Klee’s work on the 20th-century imagination.

Hannah Arendt

Was ist Politik?, Piper Verlag, 2003

Paul Klee

gewägt wägend [Daringly Balanced], 1930, 144

Watercolour and pen on paper on cardboard

31 × 24,5/23,5 cm

Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern

Benjamin Bradley

Psychology and Experience

Cambridge University Press, 2005

Paul Klee

Bruderschaft [Brotherhood], 1939, 952

Pencil on paper on cardboard, 21 × 29,5 cm

Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern

Gottfried Orth

Systematische Theologie, calwer Verlag, 2002

Paul Klee

Blick aus Rot [Glance Out of Red], 1937, 211

Pastel on cotton on coloured paste in burlap; 

reconstructed frame 47 × 50 cm

Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, donation of Livia Klee

Brent Adkins

A Guide to Ethics and Moral Philosophy

Edinburgh University Press, 2017

Paul Klee

Insula dulcamara, 1938, 481

Oil and coloured paste on paper on burlap

88 × 176 cm

Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern

The works of Paul Klee enjoy lasting popularity among authors and publishers within the field of the human sciences in the 20th century. They adorn the covers of books from the spheres of philosophy, sociology and theology, as well as psychology and psychotherapy. Paul Klee has established himself as the painter par excellence for philosophers, thinkers and theorists. His works bring to life the verbal world of abstract thought, and visualize concepts such as ‘reason’, ‘revelation’ or ‘risk’ which are difficult to imagine in pictorial terms. The Fokus exhibition juxtaposes selected book covers with their originals from the collection of the Zentrum Paul Klee, and invites the viewer to judge a book by its cover.

The books with works by Paul Klee on their covers include treatises by well-known representatives of the Frankfurt School such as Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin. Klee’s visual language reflects central experiences of modern philosophy, and associates with concepts of critical theory. Klee’s works also seem to be particularly popular for the covers of psychological and psychotherapeutic textbooks. Their high level of openness encourages a wide range of possible interpretations.

The Fokus exhibition has been assembled by guest curator Dieter Roelstraete. It is based on his book Kleine Welt, published in 2020. Dieter Roelstraete is curator at the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society at the University of Chicago. His curatorial interests lie in the relationship between art and politics, art as a form of knowledge, art as intellectual work and the conception of exhibitions as a form of writing. In the preface to his book Dieter Roelstraete explains how he came to this subject:

‘This project [...] is rooted in a twofold observation that recurs every time I pack and unpack my library. First, why do authors and/or publishers in the field of twentiethcentury philosophy and capital-T Theory so often turn to Paul Klee – indeed, often even the same Paul Klee painting, over and over again – to adorn the covers of their books? [...] What precisely, powers this force? Why Klee?’ --Dieter Roelstraete, from the preface to his book Kleine Welt, p. 5–6

Curator: Dieter Roelstraete

ZENTRUM PAUL KLEE 

Monument im Fruchtland 3, 3006 Bern

zpk.org

Rose Wylie @ Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern - "Flick and Float" Retrospective Exhibition

Rose Wylie. Flick and Float

Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern 

19 July - 5 October 2025 

Rose Wylie in her studio, June 2023

Photograph: Will Grundy

© Rose Wylie. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner

Rose Wylie. Flick and Float presents the nonconformist and fascinating work of the British artist Rose Wylie (b. 1934). Her unique artistic practice has won her international recognition. In her large-format paintings, Rose Wylie strips down figurative representations to their essentials. Expressive, direct and full of subversive humour, these works testify to her engagement with pop culture, film and art history. With more than fifty paintings and around a dozen drawings, the Zentrum Paul Klee is showing a retrospective of Wylie’s work over the last thirty years. New works have been made for the exhibition.

Rose Wylie

Dinner Outside, 2024

Oil on canvas, 183 × 328 cm, two parts

© Rose Wylie. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner

Photo: Jack Hems

Rose Wylie

Lilith and Gucci Boy, 2024

Oil on canvas, 207 × 306 cm, two parts

© Rose Wylie. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner

Photo: Jack Hems

Rose Wylie - An unconventional career: from reading to seeing

The ninety-year-old artist lives and works in a cottage not far from London. Rose Wylie received her artistic training at Folkestone and Dover School of Art, Goldsmiths College and the Royal College of Art in London. While raising her three children, she put her artistic career on pause, and, alongside her family life, spent a lot of time reading books. It was not until the late 1990s that seeing took over from reading again, as Rose Wylie explained on a visit to her studio in March 2024. She started devoting herself intensively to painting again, and finally achieved international recognition with her unique work and major solo exhibitions, at Tate Britain in London and elsewhere. The Zentrum Paul Klee is devoting a major retrospective to Rose Wylie featuring over fifty paintings and around a dozen drawings. The artist has painted eight works specially for the exhibition, which are being shown to a museum-going public for the first time in the Zentrum Paul Klee.

Rose Wylie

Jesus of Prague, 1989

Oil on canvas, 184 × 183 cm

© Rose Wylie. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner

Photo: Anna Arca

Rose Wylie

Manor, 2004

Oil on canvas, 183 × 188 cm

Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner

Photo: Soon-Hak Kwon

© Rose Wylie

Photograph courtesy of Jari Lager

Rose Wylie

The Fat Controller, 2006

Oil on canvas, 366 × 248 cm, four parts

Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner

Photo: Soon-Hak Kwon

© Rose Wylie

Photograph courtesy of Jari Lager

Rose Wylie - Inspiration from pop culture, film and art history

Rose Wylie’s large-format works, made in the studio on the first floor of her cottage, reflect a deep understanding of pop culture, film and art history. She often works with a subversive humour that also connects her to Paul Klee. Stripped down to its essentials, and with a highly expressive lightness of touch, her artistic language references an aesthetic of ‘bad painting’ and post pop. On closer examination, Wylie’s works prove to be sharply observed and subtly polished meditations on the nature of humanity.

Rose Wylie

Singing Life Model, 2017

Oil on canvas, 169 × 182 cm

Karen and Mark Smith

© Rose Wylie. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner

Photo: Anna Arca

Rose Wylie

Yellow Strip, 2006

Oil on canvas, 183 × 777 cm, five parts

© Rose Wylie. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner

Photo: Jack Hems

For Rose Wylie, the process by which a painting is made often begins with a visual stimulus. No limits are placed on her inspiration. As indicated by the title of the exhibition, Flick and Float – the artist’s own suggestion – in her working process Wylie ‘flicks’ through a flood of images until a motif attracts her attention. The motif might be a newspaper photograph on her studio floor, a scene from a film, an everyday situation from her life, an artwork or a picture that she found while surfing the internet. What the motifs share, however, is always a special detail that does not match the norm – ‘Toujours la difference!’ is a phrase of which Rose Wylie is particularly fond. So for example, in Singing Life Model, Rose Wylie shows a photographic model posing with a strangely opened mouth, while Yellow Strip shows the football star Ronaldinho with his characteristically thin pony tail, which whips in time with his every movement on the pitch.

Rose Wylie - Painting from memory

Rose Wylie usually begins by capturing her visual impressions in drawings. The drawings in the exhibition provide an insight into her creative process. Rose Wylie does not return to the reference material, but with a few strokes reduces the picture in her memory to what she sees as essential. Speaking of her ‘Film Notes’, for example, she explains:

‘When I do film paintings, I usually work from memory […] – I do not go back to the film or to film stills to check… It’s the original visual excitement I want to work with.’

Rose Wylie, on the letter ‘F’ in the A–Z of the catalogue Rose Wylie. Flick and Float

Rose Wylie then reworks the drawing until the composition and central details are consistent. If lines have to be corrected, Rose Wylie does not erase them, but sticks a new piece of paper over them, which sometimes makes the sketches look like collages. This process of discovery is also repeated on the big canvases in Wylie’s studio. Where necessary, Rose Wylie scrapes the oil paint off again and adds whole new parts of canvases. This genesis provides the second part of the exhibition title, because Rose Wylie describes the process by which her works are created as ‘floating’.

Rose Wylie - Compositional investigations with picture and writing 

Rose Wylie

Bagdad Cafe (Film Notes), 2015

Oil on canvas, 182 × 372 cm, two parts

Courtesy of the British Council Collection

Photo: Soon-Hak Kwon

© Rose Wylie. Courtesy the artist

Photograph courtesy of Jari Lager

Rose Wylie develops pictorial compositions that go beyond traditional perspectival representation. In her multi-panel works, for example, she juxtaposes apparently disparate images, giving rise to visual rhymes and resonances. One example is the two-part work Bagdad Cafe (Film Notes): while in the left half of the painting Rose Wylie reworks visual stimuli from the film of the same name, in the right half she shows scenes from her everyday life – including a flower from her garden, her own mouth when eating and a coffee stain.

‘I spell often phonetically – I paint how things look and I spell how things sound.’

Rose Wylie, in an interview with Fabienne Eggelhöfer during a visit to her studio in January 2025

Rose Wylie also includes writing as part of the composition of her works. What is central here is not so much the content of what is written as the form and arrangement of the letters on the picture surface. She places the writing deliberately to perfect her compositions. The process of writing is more important than the correct way of writing. For this reason Rose Wylie often writes words as she hears them, spelled incorrectly. Her writing style can be experienced in the A–Z section of the exhibition catalogue. In reflections on 26 ideas, Rose Wylie provides a deeper insight into her intellectual world.

Rose Wylie - Biography

Rose Wylie was born in 1934 in Hythe, in Kent in England. She lived with her family in India until the age of five. Her return to England coincided with the outbreak of the Second World War, which Rose Wylie experienced as a child.

Beginning in 1952 she studied painting at Folkestone and Dover School of Art. From 1956 she continued her training at Goldsmiths College in London with a view to teaching. It was here that she met her husband, the artist Roy Oxlade. When their first child was born she put her artistic career on pause and concentrated on the family. In the 1970s she taught painting at Sittingbourne College of Further Education. From 1979 she resumed her artistic activity by studying for a Masters at the Royal College of Art in London.

She began to submit her works for exhibitions with an open application procedure, which was how she came to be selected by Neo Rauch for EAST International at Norwich University of the Arts in 2004. In 2010 her works were shown in the exhibition Women to Watch at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, which led the feminist Germaine Greer to describe her as the ‘hottest new artist’ in an article in The Guardian. In 2013 she had her first institutional solo exhibition at Tate Britain in London, and won the renowned John Moores Painting Prize the following year. She was also appointed a Senior Royal Academician of the Royal Academy in London. Further exhibitions followed, including shows at the Serpentine Gallery in London (2017), in the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo in Málaga (2017), Aspen Art Museum in Colorado (2020), Hangaram Art Museum in Seoul (2021) and the Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst (S.M.A.K.) in Ghent (2022) to name only a few. Next year her works will be shown at the Royal Academy in London. 

Rose Wylie. Flick and Float

Catalogue of the exhibition ; Snoeck Verlag, 2025

Published by Fabienne Eggelhöfer and Nina Zimmer

With an A–Z by Rose Wylie, photographs by Juergen Teller, 

as well as a foreword by Nina Zimmer, 

Director of the Kunstmuseum Bern – Zentrum Paul Klee, 

and an introduction by Fabienne Eggelhöfer, 

Chief Curator at the Zentrum Paul Klee.

136 pages ; Language: English ; ISBN 978-3-86442-464-9

Curator: Fabienne Eggelhöfer

Curatorial assistant: Josephine Rechberg

ZENTRUM PAUL KLEE 

Monument im Fruchtland 3, 3006 Bern

zpk.org