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18/10/2012

Meret's sparks

Kunstmuseum Bern, Bern

Curated by Kathleen Bühler

Artistic freedom yesterday and now
Our big fall exhibition is the kick-off for the approaching season of homages to Meret Oppenheim in 2013. In this year Meret Oppenheim would have celebrated her 100th birthday were she still alive today.

In 2013 exhibitions commemorating this exceptional artist will be taking place in Vienna and Berlin. Our exhibition traces how various contemporary artistic creations are inspired by Meret Oppenheim’s art and ideas: Some 50 works by the outstanding surrealist woman artist enter into a dialogue with sculptures and paintings by the young Swiss artists Maya Bringolf, Vidya Gastaldon, Tatjana Gerhard, Elisabeth Llach and Francisco Sierra.

The show at the Kunstmuseum Bern inquires into the international standing of the great Swiss woman artist Meret Oppenheim and explores her impact on recent Swiss art. It illustrates how very much alive, relevant, and articulate Meret Oppenheim’s work still is today.

True to herself
Still a young artist, Meret Oppenheim moved in surrealist circles while living in Paris. She comprehended the controversial art movement surrealism as a field for experiment in her search for free modes of expression and as a basis for incorporating personal experience and confrontation with the teachings of C.G. Jung.

By studying Meret Oppenheim’s art we encounter a fascinating person and highly profound artworks. They soon reveal an early manifestation of the distinctive facets we expect in contemporary art: an interdisciplinary approach, thematic and formal diversity, a broad spectrum of techniques and materials used. At the same time, Meret Oppenheim defended her right to artistic freedom by constantly exploring novel forms of visual language. And foremost Oppenheim remained true to herself rather than dedicate her art to a specific style or movement. Her intellectual and artistic versatility and self-determination are still seen as trail-blazing even though she never sought to be a role model.

Absurd, irrational, oneiric
The surreal is the linking thread in the art of Maya Bringolf, Vidya Gastaldon, Tatjana Gerhard, Elisabeth Llach, and Francisco Sierra. They all allow absurd, irrational, and oneiric qualities to flow into their work. Despite the fact that these young Swiss artists could be Meret Oppenheim’s great- grandchildren, they still use the same media and materials as well as address similar subject matter and illustrate similar motifs as did their great predecessor.

They too engage with realities that deviate from what is visible in the everyday, honing in on the spiritual, on contemporary man’s relation to nature, on issues of creativity and its sources, on identification processes, and processing psychological urges that can neither be explained logically nor by conventional means.

Their diverse repertoire of motifs and the exceptionally varied ambience in their work also reminds us of their famous precursor: Their representations range from naive and childlike to erotic, unfathomable, and ominous. And similarly, their art is representative of a critical stance despite its strongly poetical nature. All the artists in the show create worlds that can be interpreted as stages for representing reactions to our present world.

In a total of six exhibition rooms, our selection of young Swiss artists presents new installations, paintings, and sculptures that were made especially for the show. In the exhibition’s lucid dialogue between the past and the present, we have the opportunity of discovering yet another side of the “classic early avant-garde artist" Meret Oppenheim, and her work helps us understand many of the modes of surrealism that can be found in art today.

Catalogue: Merets Funken. Die Sammlung. Gegenwartskunst des Kunstmuseums Bern, Teil 2.

Opening: Thursday, October 18, 18.30

Kunstmuseum Bern
Hodlerstrasse 8-12, Bern
Hours: Tues 10-21, Wed-Sun 10-17, Monday closed
Admission fee: CHF 14.00 / red. CHF 10.00

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