Lucas Art Talks

1. Julian Charrière, Pure Waste (Video still), 2021, © 2025, ProLitteris, Zurich, Julian Charrière        With “Midnight Zone”, the Museum Tinguely in Basel dedicates a major solo exhibition to French-Swiss artist Julian Charrière (b. 1987). Spread over three floors, the show immerses visitors in aquatic environments that extend from the Rhine flowing beneath the museum to the abyssal depths of remote oceans.         Water, in this exhibition, is not a passive motif but a medium. The works on view invite us to drift across different states of perception: from glacial suspension to oceanic descent, from liquid fire to fossilized time. Rather than staging a conventional display of environmental catastrophe, Charrière opens spaces for resonance, where wonder and unease, scientific observation and poetic speculation coexist.        Curated by Roland Wetzel and Tabea Panizzi, the exhibition is conceived as a hydrological syste...

1.  "Vija Celmins", Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, 2025, © Vija Celmins, Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery, Photo: Mark Niedermann A slow gaze to infinity      At a time when images move quickly and attention is short, Vija Celmins offers something very different. Her art doesn’t ask to be understood right away or aim to stir strong emotions. Instead, it asks us to slow down and take time to really look at her work, though every details. With her careful methods and limited subjects, Celmins shows that repetition can have depth, and that beauty can come from looking closely, again and again to the same object, like a recurring motif.        The Fondation Beyeler’s 2025 exhibition stands as a landmark moment in the European reception of Celmins’s work. Although she is celebrated and widely collected in the United States, full-scale presentations of her oeuvre remain rare on this side of the Atlantic. The show brings together around ninety works, mos...

1. Medardo Rosso, La conversazione , 1903, Museo Medardo Rosso, Barzio, Photo Credit : mumok / Markus Wörgötter      The exhibition "Medardo Rosso: Inventing Modern Sculpture" at the Kunstmuseum Basel is the first major retrospective in Switzerland in over two decades of the Italian sculptor. It was organized in collaboration with mumok (Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien) and presents approximately 50 sculptures and more than 250 drawings and photographs. The exhibition is structured in two main parts: a monographic presentation on the ground floor of the Neubau, and a thematic dialogue with over 60 artists on the second floor. These artists range from contemporaries of Rosso to major figures of the 20th and 21st centuries. The exhibition invites the viewer to understand Rosso not only as a pioneer of modern sculpture but as an essential reference for contemporary artistic practices. 2. Medardo Rosso, Rieuse , 1910, Private Collection, Photograph : mumok / Markus...

1. Installation view,  Francis Alÿs - Kids Take Over,  Museum Ludwig, Cologne 2025,  Photo: Historisches Archiv mit Rheinischem Bildarchiv/Vincent  Quack  © Francis Alÿs Francis Alÿs – Kids Take Over        The exhibition Francis Alÿs – Kids Take Over at the Museum Ludwig presents a comprehensive view of the Belgian-born, Mexico-based artist’s recent work which focused on children's games around the world. Following his receipt of the 2023 Wolfgang Hahn Prize, the museum collaborated closely with Alÿs to develop this large-scale presentation, which centers on his long-term video project “Children’s Games” and includes smaller sections dedicated to his paintings, drawings, and a collaborative curatorial experiment with children a school from Cologne.        The show focuses on how children, through play, engage with their immediate environments, rural and urban, peaceful and conflict-ridden, offering insights into cultural ...