Agenda

According to common belief, Islam has an absolute ban on images and is hostile to pictorial representations, quite in contrast to Christianity. But is this actually true? Are images categorically forbidden in Islam? And what about Christianity: doesn’t the Second Commandment state “thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image”?

The exhibition In the name of the Image. Imagery and between Cult and Prohibition in Islam and Christianity (Im Namen des Bildes. Das Bild zwischen Kult und Verbot in Islam und Christentum) deals with such questions on a comparative, cross-cultural basis. It traces the strategies Islam and Christianity applied over the centuries to deal with aniconism.

The focus is on the Middle Ages, that is, the period from the 6th to the 16th century. During this time, the question of images was debated extensively by theologians. The 136 works on display cover a geographic area that stretches from Latin Western Europe (Kingdom of France and Holy Roman Empire) to the eastern Mediterranean (Byzantine Empire and later Ottoman Empire) to Western Asia (Persia) and as far as South Asia (Mughal Empire in India).

Complementary to the exhibition, the museum is organizing a series of lectures to address certain aspects in more depth, and in which we get to hear what world-renowned experts have to say on the subject.

With a major retrospective on Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986), the Fondation is dedicating the exhibition to one of the most significant artists of the 20th century and an outstanding figure in modern American art.

From O’Keeffe’s earliest abstractions to her iconic depictions of flowers and landscapes of the American Southwest, the retrospective will offer an in-depth survey of the artist’s work including rarely seen paintings from public and private collections.

The exhibition examines her particular way of looking at her surroundings and translating them into new and hitherto unseen images of reality.

The exhibition aims to focus the attention on the topicality of O’Keeffe’s bold and radical way of looking. Spanning more than six decades, it is the first major retrospective in Basel and the first comprehensive overview of her oeuvre in Switzerland for almost 20 years.

In the newly designed Sculpture Hall, the museum presents its new collection of Greek sculptures from the Archaic, Classical and Hellenistic periods and Roman marble copies of famous Greek works, which give an overview of the development of ancient Greek development sculpture.

One focus is the idealised body of the 5th and 4th centuries BC, made according to rules of proportion and beauty.

Gods and goddesses, athletic heroes and maenads are depicted alongside poets and philosophers, rulers and other historical figures, whose funerary reliefs testify to their social position at the time.

The figures and reliefs are made of precious materials such as marble or bronze. Today, these cultural testimonies still delight us with their timeless aesthetics and brilliant sculptural achievements.