Agenda

Joan Miró (1893-1983) is known for his colourful surrealist dream worlds. The Catalan artist extended his concept of painting in a hitherto unfamiliar direction after 1956. however. This new beginning forms the starting point for the exhibition (Joan Miró: Neue Horizonte).

The artist saw conventional easel painting as a limitation and tried to find new expressive forms. He ‘painted’, for example, with fire and scissors rather than a brush and expanded his technique to textiles or overpainted classical paintings. In this way he produced large-format raw paintings and sculptures that remain resolutely contemporary.

The exhibition includes 74 works, mostly from the late 1960s, the 1970s and the early 1980s. Most come from the holdings of the Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona as well as the Fundació Pilar i Joan Miró in Mallorca.

The artist Paul Klee (1879-1940) and Joan Miró highly appreciated each others works and artistic concepts. The encounter with Paul Klee’s work made a lasting impression on Joan Miró and vice versa. Thanks to the study of the Klee´s work Miró also succeeded in finding a balance between figurative Surrealism and abstraction.

The exhibition was realised in close collaboration with the Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona.

The Fondation de l’Hermitage hosta a major retrospective of Léon Spilliaert (1881- 946), one of the most important representatives of Belgian art in the early 20^th century.

He created his profoundly original work almost entirely on paper, combining different graphic techniques in images imbued with metaphysical questioning and Flemish culture.

His art can be linked to the Symbolism and Expressionism of his time, while the extreme simplification of his most radical landscapes seems to herald geometrical abstraction and minimalism.

Before the First World War (1914-1918) Spilliaert primarily used Indian ink wash, watercolour, pastel and coloured crayons to create pared down landscapes bordering on abstraction – sky, sea and the line of the seawall vibrating in dull light. The few figures who appear on these melancholic shores are usually women.

Spilliaert’s depiction of human beings culminated in striking self-portraits. After 1920 Spilliaert made great use of watercolour and gouache, creating flamboyant, highly lyrical seascapes sometimes verging on the abstract. In the 1930s and 40s he returned to nature trees. His fascinating and timeless images radiate a sense of peace combined with a sense of the uncanny.

The exhibition (Vom Wert der Kunst in German) intends to find out more about the complex relationship between art and value using works from the collection of the Art Museum Graubünden,

The works correlate with topics about which the visitors can approach the value mystery. What does a work of art that consists of food, which slowly decomposes, tell us about the meaning of material consistency? What insights does the mystification about the role of authorship give us? What does irony tell us about artistic appropriation? What knowledge do we gain about the limitations of the art context?

Today, It is increasingly taken for granted that artists and experts should not have the only final say. The public also wants to be included in these processes. The exhibition seeks to stimulate discussion and allows personal interpretations.