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Medienmitteilung Fr 20.01.12

Annual Media Conference

Art analog and digital Kunst analog und digital

The Kunstmuseum Bern is presenting a highly varied exhibition program in 2012. With our guests Sean Scully, Antonio Saura, and Zarina Bhimji, we are featuring internationally renowned artists. Furthermore, we will be presenting artists closely affiliated to Bern, as is the case with Meret Oppenheim, Johannes Itten, Paul Klee, Hermann Hesse, and Otto Nebel. The photographers Marco Grob, Fritz Hiepler and David Brunier will launch our annual program. In 2012, the Kunstmuseum Bern is pursuing new avenues by expanding its use of social media channels to bring art analog and digitally to a broader audience.

Art analog …
In March, the photography exhibition Industrious: Marco Grob & hiepler, brunier, will launch our annual program. As part of a large-scale project for the centennial anniversary of the Swiss-based international Holcim Group, portrait photographer Marco Grob and industrial photographers David Hiepler and Fritz Brunier took momentous large-format pictures of employees and production plants around the world. Following this show and in collaboration with the Lentos Kunstmuseum Linz, the Kunstmuseum Bern will devote an extensive retrospective to one of the world’s great masters of abstract painting in Sean Scully: Grey Wolf. Scully manages to create a surprising scope of highly atmospheric artworks. The artist cooperated in producing both the exhibition and the catalogue. And from late March our audiences will be able to discover Hermann Hesse as a painter in the exhibition «... die Grenzen überfliegen» The exhibition title is also the motto for the 50th anniversary of the artist’s decease, which will be commemorated with an international conference and highly diverse program of events. In a broader sense of the term, British media artist Zarina Bhimji also addresses the subject of borders. Of Indian parents, the artist very often tackles issues of migration, globalization, and post-colonial history with her lyrical photographs, films, and installations. The exhibition is a joint production with the much-acclaimed White Chapel Gallery in London. From June 6 our guest will be Antonio Saura, a leading 20th-century artist and formative exponent of Spanish painting. The comprehensive retrospective focuses on all phases of the artist’s creative development, showing large-format masterpieces from his oeuvre of paintings while additionally exploring facets of his illustrative and graphic work. Also sculptures by the artist will be shown. In autumn the group exhibition Meret’s Sparks, works by young Swiss artists can be compared with Meret Oppenheim's art, who would have celebrated her hundredth birthday in 2013. Our presentation of painter and poet Otto Nebel, resident in Bern over many decades, focuses on how painting, drawing, printmaking, collage, and literary texts interrelate, that is, on the mutual relationship between text and image. The year will end with an artistic debate on the subject of color: Itten – Klee. Cosmos of Color will impressively document how the two artists reciprocally inspired one another.

... and digital
In 2012 the Kunstmuseum Bern will be under the sway of digital media. The app «museen bern», jointly initiated by the Kunstmuseum Bern and the Zentrum Paul Klee, will be available free of charge from February 2012 at the App Store. Additionally we are improving and enhancing our Facebook page, and the Kunstmuseum Bern is now new on Twitter and also has its own YouTube channel with podcasts on highlights from the collection. From the end of February our new website will be available online, giving our visitors further new opportunities of interacting with our museum digitally.