Agenda

Dada is one of the most progressive art movements of the 20th century. To mark its centenary, the Arp Museum Bahnhof Rolandseck, in cooperation with café Voltaire in Zurich, resurrects Dada’s foremost birthplaces: the legendary artist nightclub “Cabaret Voltaire” and the bourgeois “Galerie Dada”. Setting off from these two poles, the Dadaists revolutionised the international art world within a short span of time. Aside from their own works, they also showed such international avant-garde artists as Pablo Picasso, Giorgio de Chirico, and Paul Klee, all of whom are represented in the present exhibition. The artworks are embedded in a lively staging that sheds light on the complex social and intellectual soil from which Dada sprang. Subjects ranging from psychology and literature to political and sociocultural revolts reflect the zeitgeist and provide for a vivid presentation of Dada’s origins.

The exhibition shows the mysterious World of Maurits Cornelis Escher (1898–1972), the Dutch artist and his special printings and drawings. More than 110 works are displayed, woodcuts, lithographical works, drawings. Trained as an architect, he broke off this study and continued as graphical designer with a focus on dimensional experiments based on geometrical ornaments, mathematics and optical illusions. His art can be regarded as surrealistic, because of the compositions of contradictory objects and locations, the dissolution of the logic order, the use of metamorphoses and the connection between dream and ratio.

To mark the 500th year since his death, Het Noordbrabants Museum is presenting the exhibition, ‘Jheronimus Bosch – Visions of genius’, from 13th February to 8th May 2016. For one time only, the majority of his work will return to his city, Den Bosch, officially known as ’s-Hertogenbosch. Bosch’s themes are based on tradition, but his artistic language and way of working was entirely modern. His visions were based on religious conviction, realism and fantasy.
Around 20 paintings and 19 drawings by Hieronymus Bosch (1450-1516) will be exhibited, including four triptychs and four double-sided painted panels. The exhibition will also show panels which were painted in Bosch’s work place as well as important followers. In addition, art works from the 15th and 16th centuries will provide the context in which Bosch created his work, and film presentations will provide insight into the surprising results of the Bosch research.

Spanning the period from the return of the Medici to Florence in 1512 and the initial artistic endeavours of the new generation around Pontormo and Rosso to the 1568 publication of Vasari’s Lives (In Le Vite de più eccellenti architetti, et scultori italiani)  the exhibition will be devoted to Florence as the first centre of European Mannerism.
More than 120 paintings,drawings and sculptures will provide an overview of a stylistically formative epoch (from 1512) for which the art historiographer Giorgio Vasari coined the colourful term “maniera” in 1568. Elegant, cultivated and artificial, but also capricious, extravagant and sometimes bizarre: Mannerism. One of the works in the Städel holdings – Bronzino’s famous Portrait of a Lady in Red (ca. 1533) – formed the point of departure for this ambitious show. The project is being carried out with special support from the museums of Florence, above all the Uffizi, the Galleria dell’Accademia and the Galleria Palatina. Further key loans will come from such prominent museums as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the Paris Louvre, the Prado and the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid, the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, the Szépművészeti Múzeum in Budapest and the Brera in Milan.

The art-historical development of the decades from 1512 to 1568 will be presented in close relation to Florentine city history and Medici rule – themes to be investigated in both the exhibition and the accompanying catalogue.