Agenda

The exhibition and the accompanying book portray the (forensic) work of the interdisciplinary research team.

It gives surprising insights into the fate and life of Anna Bischoff (1719-1787) and everyday life in Basel and Strasbourg in the eighteenth century. The team also reconstructed her clothes and the most likely cause of her death.

The search for the ancestors of Anna Catharina Bischoff also revealed astonishing facts. Anna is the great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandmother of Boris Johnson (1964), the current UK Prime Minister.

Gerhard Hotz, Claudia Opitz-Blakhal (Eds.) Anna Catharina Bischoff. Die Mumie aus der Barfüsserkirche, Rekonstruktion einer Basler Frauenbiografie des 18. Jahrhunderts. Christoph Merian Verlag, Basel, 2021).

The museum is presenting, in collaboration with the Menil Collection in Houston and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the first major transatlantic retrospective devoted to Meret Oppenheim.

It includes some 200 key works on paper, objects, sculptures and paintings, and among other things it gives a glimpse of the largest museum portfolio of works by the artist in the world, which is held by the Kunstmuseum Bern. Bern is the first stop of the exhibition and the only one in Europe.

Francisco de Goya (1746–1828) was one of the last great court artists and the first forerunner of modern art. He was both a painter of impressive portraits and an inventor of enigmatic, highly personal pictorial worlds.

Spanning more than 60 years, Goya’s career covers a period ranging from Rococo to Romanticism. He depicted saints and criminals, witches and demons, pushing open the gate to realms in which the boundaries between reality and fantasy become blurred. In his art, Goya shows himself a keen observer of the drama unfolding between reason and irrationality, dreams and nightmares.

The exhibition brings together around 70 paintings and more than 100 masterful drawings and prints. For the first time, seldom seen paintings from  private collections are shown alongside key works from European and American museums and private collections.

The exhibition is accompanied by a new film by Philippe Parreno (1964) The artist devotes his new work to Goya’s long-destroyed country house and its legendary murals, the Pinturas negras (Black paintings). This installation illustrates Goya’s enduring influence on subsequent generations of artists from Picasso to Warhol to the present day.