This section contains an overview of the most relevant exhibitions in Switzerland and neighbouring regions. Each item is connected to the organizing museum.
Around 1900, painter and lithographer Anton Reckziegel (1865-1936) shaped the image of Switzerland as a tourist destination. The castle of Spiez hosts an exhibition dedicated to his work, complemented by impressions from present-day artists. The exhibition is organized in cooperation with the Swiss Alpine Museum (Alpines Museum der Schweiz).
The exhibition turns the spotlight on the rich collection of the museum, presenting world-famous works as well as rarely-seen treasures in new contexts. The display is set out before a backdrop of events in the history of Basel that are brought into focus by this art. The show is organized around selected moments in Basel’s varied history of ideas and everyday practices and the lives of individuals associated with the city: the humanist Erasmus of Rotterdam, the painting The Dead Christ in the Tomb by Hans Holbein the Younger, the illustrator and naturalist Maria Sibylla Merian, the historian and art historian Jacob Burckhardt, the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, the 1912 Basel Peace Congress, the figure skaters Frick and Frack, the inventor of LSD Albert Hofmann, and the women’s rights activist Iris von Roten.
According to the Chinese lunar calendar, the New Year begins this year on 16 February. Colourful prints featuring tutelary deities and divinities of good fortune play an important part in the festivities. Printed on ordinary paper, these prints were essentially religious supplies, some were pinned up on doors to ward off evil spirits and left there for the remainder of the year, while others were set up on an altar and later ceremoniously burned. The more than ninety prints, the majority of them collected around 1926, originated from different print shops in northern and southern China. They reflect the diversity of Chinese folk art, granting viewers a charming glimpse of the lives and beliefs among China’s general population. The German photographer Michael Wolf created a fascinating series of photographs showing small, humble shrines devoted to the earth god, which stand on nearly every street corner in Hong Kong. A selection of photographs bearing witness to this living tradition is also on show in the exhibition.