Exhibition

Ausstellungsflügel

Glass is one of the oldest and most puzzling materials humans work with. As a matter of fact, its structure and its atomic configuration have still not been entirely explained today. So it is hardly any wonder that the fascination of this mysterious material has not waned since people first discovered how to make it in Mesopotamia and Egypt more than 3600 years ago.

Ever since painting reached the modern period, representations of transparent illusions, of what is hardly existent, have been more suitable than almost any other motif for demonstrating a artistic skill in painting. Thus the transparency and seeming "non-objectivity" of a glass object, its contrasting properties of simultaneous fragility and hardness, its ability to bundle light, to call forth reflections and reflect the world in a microcosm, have stimulated painters in every period art history to do their very best.

Inspired by the museum's internationally noteworthy Hentrich Glass Collection, the "Fragile Beauty" exhibition will be focusing on this delicate, transparent material as a source of inspiration for artistic ideas in all epochs. And indeed, Peter Paul Rubens was as fascinated by the qualities of glass objects as Gerhard Richter by the reflection of glass panes, and so the exhibition will be devoted not only to mastery in painting, but also to the use of glass itself as an artistic material. It will investigate how the theme of glass appears in art and the artistic means and methods used to express this theme. In addition, the working of the material and its applications disclose a great deal about the human condition, about table culture, the rituals of everyday life, festive customs and sacred ceremonies, as well as how we try to cope with impermanence and death. In this way, glass becomes a carrier of symbolic content and functions as a code for ways of thinking and perceiving.

The exhibition will be displaying key works from large international museums and private collections, supplemented by works from the museum's own inventory, so that roughly 150 masterpieces of painting and graphic art from the Renaissance to today will be presented, as well as object art, installations and photographs of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Among other things, artistic panels of the early modern period, as well as works of the still-life and genre-painting from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries will be shown (including works by Pieter Claesz, Willem Kalf, and others), right up to the subtle peinture of Claude Monet. Works by August Macke or Amédée Ozenfant, which deal with the dissolution of form and of the material aspect of glass, will be contrasted with works by László Moholy-Nagy, El Lissitzky and Marcel Duchamp. A special section of the exhibition will be dedicated to the use of glass in architecture. The exhibition will culminate with items from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, represented by such artists as Hans Haacke, Mario Merz,
Louise Bourgeois and Tony Cragg,as well as by artists of the younger generation like Pipilotti Rist, Kris Vleeshouwer or Ulrike Möschel.

A catalogue with articles by Bettina Baumgärtel, Klaus Grimm, Anja Kregeloh, Bernd Nicolai, Helmut Ricke, Stephan von Wiese and Beat Wismer will be published for the exhibition, which was conceived by Beat Wismer in cooperation with the curators of the museum kunst palast.

Public tours on Sundays at 3:00 p.m. and Wednesdays at 4:00 p.m.
Guided tour with the curator, Dr. Bettina Baumgärtel, at 5:00 p.m. on May 27, 2008
Additional tours: Nicole Roth, M.A., at 5:00 p.m. on May 5, 2008
Silvia Carmellini, M.A., at 11:00 a.m. on June 10, 2008