OUTSTANDING!
With some 130 exhibits by over 100 artists from Europe and the USA, the major survey exhibition OUTSTANDING! will focus on relief art, tracing its evolution from 1800 to the 1960s. Conjoining sculpture and painting, space and surface, the relief challenges our visual faculties. Its existence in this in-between realm has made it a classic field for experimentation. High-calibre works on loan, from the Kunstmuseum Basel, the Kunstmuseum Den Haag, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen in Rotterdam and others, will allow visitors to experience the arresting diversity and innovative force of the art of relief.
While neoclassical sculptors such as Bertel Thorvaldsen drew on works from antiquity, nineteenth-century artists including Auguste Rodin and Medardo Rosso strove to transcend the limitations of sculpture. Painter-sculptors Edgar Degas, Paul Gauguin, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and others renegotiated in their reliefs the treatment of form and colour. In the twentieth century, new techniques then spurred change, with Dadaists like Kurt Schwitters and Hans Arp developing relief collages from everyday objects and materials including wood, paper and plastic. Artists of the Russian avant-garde, the Bauhaus, and the Constructivist movement – among them Willi Baumeister, Oskar Schlemmer and Sophie Taeuber-Arp – set out to shape a new world and reform society with their works. Since the 1950s, artists such as Jan Schoonhoven and Piero Manzoni have been devoting themselves to exploring pictorial surfaces and their structures. Women artists including Louise Nevelson and Lee Bontecou in the meantime made a place for themselves in art history with expansive.
The show is divided into twelve thematic chapters. Artists from different eras thus enter into a lively dialogue on selected aspects of relief, for example: Narrative, Painterly/Plastic, Multicolor, Multiple Perspective, and Breaking the Surface.
With its first exhibition in around 40 years on the theme of relief, the Hamburger Kunsthalle is shedding light on an art form that is still too little known, one that appeals equally to our senses of sight and touch, and is today more significant than ever in an age of flat screens and social distancing.
An exhibition of the Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main (24 May to 17 September 2023) and the Hamburger Kunsthalle.
Supported by: Hubertus Wald Stiftung, Freunde der Kunsthalle e. V.
Cultural partner: NDR Kultur
Media partners: Hamburger Abendblatt
