Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern: Cosmos Klee. The collection

The permanent exhibition Cosmos Klee. The collection offers visitors a chronological overview of Klee's artistic oeuvre and presents around seventy works as well as biographical material and archive items, which are changed regularly. In one room, smaller focus exhibitions with a thematic reference to Paul Klee and his work are shown.

FOCUS: Hamed Abdalla (1917-1985)
The Egyptian artist Hamed Abdalla (1917-1985) was a pioneer of Egyptian modernism. He lived in Europe from the 1950s onwards. This exhibition is the first to be dedicated to him in Switzerland. He worked intensively with Paul Klee and experimented with various techniques. Arabic calligraphy was a central starting point. As an artist of the Hurufiyya movement, which developed new artistic possibilities from the Arabic alphabet, he invented his own "creative words" in which he mixed abstraction and human forms.
January 27 to May 26, 2024

FOCUS: Sarah Morris. All Systems Fail
Originally British and now based in New York, painter and filmmaker Sarah Morris (*1967) combines abstract painting with questions of modernity and power in her work.Morris is interested in the systems that permeate our lives in modern society and how these manifest themselves in different cities and cultural contexts - from the architecture of large corporations to transportation and digital infrastructure. The exhibition offers a comprehensive overview of the artist's work, including her filmic oeuvre. The 15 films, which will be shown in cinema boxes in the exhibition, are dedicated to the dynamics of global metropolises such as Los Angeles or Beijing and merge with the paintings to form an artistic unit.
March 29 to August 4, 2024

FOKUS: Architecture with clover. From Mies van der Rohe to Lisbeth Sachs
Paul Klee's art and visual thinking were influential for numerous architects. Many acquired one or more works by the artist. Mies van der Rohe owned the largest collection. Lina Bo Bardi and Aldo van Eyck acquired one of Paul Klee's many imaginary architectural representations, a selection of which is presented in the exhibition. Carlo Scarpa designed the Klee exhibition at the Venice Biennale in 1948 and subsequently adopted Paul Klee's artistic compositional principles. The post-war generation of architects, including Aldo Rossi and the Swiss architect Lisbeth Sachs, also began to study Klee's writings and were particularly interested in Klee's process-oriented work. Organic forms in nature became a central reference for her designs and dissolved the rectangular strictness. A special focus is placed on the works of Lisbeth Sachs, who has been little known to date.
June 1 to October 13, 2024
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