After more than a year of special exhibitions, the Hilti Art Foundation is once again presenting a selection of artworks exclusively from its own collection. With 40 works, 24 of which are on public display for the first time as part of a Hilti Art Foundation exhibition, The Whole Palette offers a representative insight into the current state of the collection.
The most beautiful works of painting will be on display, including well-known paintings by Pablo Picasso, Max Beckmann, Ferdinand Hodler, Piet Mondrian and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, as well as first-class new acquisitions by Edvard Munch, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Max Ernst, Verena Loewensberg, Gerhard Richter and Callum Innes. New works of collage, sculpture, photography and graphic art are also on display, for example by Henri Matisse, Jean Tinguely, Frank Thiel and Carol Wyss. Spread over three floors, The Whole Palette not only offers a surprising variety of genres and styles, but also motifs, materials and colors.
Edvard Munch, Minchen Torkildsen, 1893-94 © Hilti Art Foundation
"At best, an encounter with works of art brings about a sensual and spiritual uplift in people, in other words a transformation. As curator of the Hilti Art Foundation exhibitions, it has always been my goal and desire to bring about this transformation in visitors. Of course, this wish cannot be fulfilled without people's willingness to enter into an open encounter with works of art and thus allow the transformation to take place," says the curator of the exhibition, Uwe Wieczorek. The whole palette is also Wieczorek's last exhibition at the Hilti Art Foundation, for which he worked as a curator for more than 20 years and whose collection he has continuously built up and expanded.
"The whole palette", exhibition view © Hilti Art Foundation
On the first basement floor, the artistic representation of man from the end of the 19th century to the 20th century is illustrated by way of example. The room presents impressive works by artists such as Edvard Munch, Medardo Rosso, Pablo Picasso, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Germaine Richier and Max Beckmann. The focus is on the question of how the physical and psychological existence of people in a world that is constantly changing due to science, industry, technology or even war can be translated into an "image". The exhibition also shows, for example, how the aftermath of the First World War was artistically processed by Paul Klee and Max Beckmann. The second floor is dedicated to the wealth of constructivist and concrete art of the 20th century and illustrates the development of European abstraction, starting with pioneers such as Hans Arp, Sophie Taeuber and Piet Mondrian. Mondrian's "classical" paintings developed continuously from the abstraction of natural forms. They testify to a fine sense of compositional balance and, in their reduction of the color palette and the strictness of the horizontal-vertical line structure, condense into parables of a universal order.
"The whole palette", exhibition view © Hilti Art Foundation
Order and grids as forms of expression of the human spirit also determine the works of other artists, including Frank Thiel and Gerhard Richter, but they differ in their individual relationship to rule and chance. The mysteriousness of the emergence and appearance of artistic forms - a line, a contour, an outline or a sculptural body - determines the "picture" on the third floor. Callum Innes' bright lines appear like rising fireworks. The depiction of forms in Yves Tanguy's and Alexander Calder's work - still of indeterminate identity, yet recognizably corporeal - transforms into the sculptural, and in Ferdinand Hodler's work finally comes to the fore as a natural human figure. With Alberto Giacometti, however, it becomes clear how the physically visible once again eludes artistic grasp due to its unfathomable complexity.
November 17, 2023 to October 27, 2024
www.kunstmuseum.li
Henri Matisse, Composition Jaune Bleu et Noir, 1947 © Hilti Art Foundation
