1. Andrea Büttner, Erntende, 2021, Exhibition view "Andrea Büttner - The Heart of Relations", Kunstmuseum Basel - Gegenwart - © Andrea Büttner and ProLitteris, Zürich. Photo: Max Ehrengruber
The power of storytelling and human stories
Until the start of October 2023, the Kunstmuseum Basel and the curator Maja Wismer and Alice Wilke presents to the public two important, international and regional exhibitions dedicated to the representation of personal stories and storytelling.
On one side, the exhibition " Andrea Büttner - The Heart of Relations", curated by the head of contemporary art of the Kunstmuseum Basel, Maja Wismer presents the German born artist in all it's complexity with in situ installation and thematic grouping of her works.
On the other side, the exhibition of the artist Gina Folly focus on a series of photography and installation produced in recent years. The photographs depict two new series of works made around the theme "being needed" and "being in use", while presenting the members of the association Quasi Tutto.
2. Andrea Büttner, Untitled, 2017, Exhibition view Kunstmuseum Basel I Gegenwart, © Andrea Büttner and ProLitteris, Zürich. Photo: Julian Salinas
Andrea Büttner, Brown Wall Painting, 2006, Exhibition view Kunstmuseum Basel I Gegenwart, © Andrea Büttner and ProLitteris, Zürich. Creditline: Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau, München, Photo: Julian Salinas
"The Heart of Relations"
The exhibition of Andrea Buttler is deeply complex, in all the sense of the word. Beside the show starting in the Gegenwart (the first museum only dedicated to contemporary art), and the Neubau (the new extension of the museum), the show reflects on fifteen years of practice, which are presented with 19 works.
Since the 2000s, the German born artist have developed "bodies of works" dedicated to numerous themes of today's society such as (forced) labour, poverty, shame, community, political systems, religion and social behaviour. But her fame came due to her imposing engraving coming from numerous series such as "Little Sisters: Lunapark Ostia", "Dancing Nuns" or "Phone Etching".
The exhibition starts in the Gegenwart (Along the Rhine), with an in situ installation title "Brown Wall Painting" from 2006. Like the title suggests, the work is made out of a brown wall, whose outline was created by the artist using a brush and his made at the height reached by the artist’s outstretched arm.
In dialogue to this work, you have a small-format graphite sketch "Untitled" from 2022 which present a figure with a noticeably large pair of hands. You also have a projection space titled "Kunstgeschichte des Bückens" from 2021 which presents a series of works around the theme of the process of the garden, from harvesting, gardening, mending, procession and washing with are demonstrated in western art.
Once you finish this important space, you can encounter a new series of work titled "Phone Etchings" (2015) coming from the artist's collection and the collection of the museum, this work depicts our use of smartphones and how the smudged traces left by her fingers on the smartphone’s display can create a motif.
For this specific series, the artist visibly rendered the smudged traces left by her fingers on the smartphone’s display by enlarging them and by creating different versions, sometimes monochrome and sometimes using colours.
From a far, those engraving looks like gestural expression, pictures from Joan Mitchell, Willem de Kooning of even Jackson Pollock, but the closer you look, the closer you see the real fingerprints, the real sensation of movement from an object we carry every day.
The third room of the exhibition is dedicated to Büttner's fascination to Emmanuel Kant’s work "Kritik der Urteilskraft" (Critique of Judgement), which was first publish in 1790. While the text is one of the most important of Western philosophy and aesthetics, the philosopher actually question the relation between the images of Kant and the text who juxtapose the work.
In a contemporary reflection, Büttner's work is made with found images on the Internet with motifs she researched herself in the German philosopher’s private library. The result is a new series of large-format offset prints featuring anatomical sketches, internet snapshots, natural elements and aesthetic based pictures.
While the whole series is titled "Images in Kant’s - Critique of the Power Judgment" (2014), the work is in an ongoing evolution, thus the Kunstmuseum present for the first time a new mural titled "Schamstrafen" (2022–2023).
The exhibition continues with numerous series of works such as "Bench" (2012-2018) which reflect on the link between the design and the functional aspect of a work. The religious aspect of her work is not left behind with the video "Little Sisters: Lunapark Ostia" (2012), which focus on the artist’s conversations with two nuns from the religious community Little Sisters of Jesus, who operate a booth in an amusement park in Rome.
In the exhibition itself, you find a touring exhibition entitled "Die gefährlichste Krankheit" (The Most Dangerous Disease), which was first initiated for a project untitled “Peace Library – Anti-War Museum.”. This project presents images of war and peace, which draw attention to the destructiveness of war and sought ways of avoiding it.
Around the installation, you see a series of etching produced at different stages of her career, such as "Dancing Nuns" (2007), etchings "Untitled" (Three Kings) (2012) and "Untitled" (baby on rock) (2018), all of them referring to the Christian religion and events.
What stroke me the most in this exhibition is the amount of work and how the artist, clearly shapeshifted the original exhibition space of the building, especially in the seventh room and the passageway between the two buildings. Because that's how it should be when an artist, with the curator explore the space, see the limits and tries to work with it, while constructing a new space for the exhibition.
I had this feeling again in the Neubau. The exhibition continues there in the passageway between the old and the new building with a Green Velvet passageway presenting a series of wood etchings made in 2015 "Beggars", which are invocative of a range of art-historical models arranged around the representations of the birth of Christ and representation of the rich and the poor.
The artist also decided to play with the collection of the museum, like Jenny Holzer did for the Louise Bourgeois exhibition a year ago. In the passageway she presents a series of engraving by the Dutch master Rembrandt van Rijn, and in the collection presentation she added her series "Bread Paintings" in the exhibition rooms of the Old Masters.
The connexion
3. Gina Folly, Quasitutto, 2023, Exhibition view of "Gine Folly. Autofocus" Kunstmuseum Basel I Gegenwart, 2023 © Gina Folly, 2023, Photo: Max Ehrengruber.
Gina Folly, Bank VI (Konica), 2023, Exhibition view of "Gine Folly. Autofocus" Kunstmuseum Basel I Gegenwart, 2023 © Gina Folly, 2023, Photo: Max Ehrengruber.
Beside the show of the German artist Andrea Büttner, the exhibition is deeply liked to personal stories and telling stories of today's population. In contrast, the exhibition of Gina Folly, the winner of the 2023 Manor Art Prize presents a series of works, most of them photography reflecting on the themes of "being needed" and "being in use".
Her subject is the members of the association Quasi Tutto which are a "small service provider mostly run by retired women and men", all together, they set up a platform on which they offer all kinds of service: gardening, decluttering, installing TV and internet service to repairing old devices.
With this storytelling of a group of old citizens from Switzerland, Folly dictate how the old generation should not be a shame of ending their work-life to create a new life, deeper and full of meaning for the population in needs.
Informations about the exhibition
Place: Kunstmuseum Basel
Date: April - October 2023
Curator: Maja Wismer and Alice Wilke
Ticket: Available on the website of the Kunstmuseum Basel OR at the front desk of the museum
Informations about the Kunstmuseum Basel
Kunstmuseum Basel
St. Alban-Graben 8
CH-4010 Basel
Phone: +41 61 206 62 62
Fax: +41 61 206 62 52
Mail: info@kunstmuseumbasel.ch