Envisioned by museum director Séverine Fromaigeat and performance artist Paul Maheke, the exhibition offers a journey alongside objects of incredibly diverse forms and functions. Freely associated, they unfold from room to room, like territories to be explored, a memory rising to the surface, or spirits awakening.

L’article Pleasing the Spirits est apparu en premier sur Barbier-Mueller Museum.

A close friend of the Barbier-Mueller family, John Armleder made a selection from his body of work starting from a glass sculpture he made in 2017 as a tribute to Jean Paul Barbier-Mueller and which was exhibited at the museum the same year.

John Armleder, À Jean Paul, 2017.

He has chosen works that evoke transparency which have been until now rarely or never exhibited. Pieces from the Barbier-Mueller collection were chosen for the aesthetic connections or contrasts they form with the artist’s works, and for their potential, with the latter, to address and explore the themes of knowledge and traditional skills transmission, of splintering or embedding. Brought together as a group, certain works become the protagonists of a mythological or fantasized narrative.

L’article Transparents est apparu en premier sur Barbier-Mueller Museum.

The visitors acquainted with what we call the “primitive” arts will not be surprised to see the representations of men and women in their most simplistic attire. Nevertheless, if we pay closer attention, the nudity does not leave us indifferent: it impresses us, shocks us sometime, makes us laugh or attracts us.

This selection of pieces leads us to wonder: is nudity the choice of the artist, of the sculptor? What does a naked body symbolize? What was the author trying to portray by deforming the body, making it beautiful, ugly, simple, geometric or on the contrary realistic?

Through the centuries and the territories, we have discovered that nudity often rhymes with maternity, the might and the power, virility, life and death, sexuality… We represent it to ensure fertility, as protection from the forces of evil and in the afterlife, or even to simply laugh about it.

These objects find a new purpose through our eyes. Their forms, their material, their colors become in our eyes an art that we observe and admire. This art intrigues and fascinates us. Here, the body in the shape of a violin of a stylized woman incised in marble from Cyclades appears as the expression of the perfect beauty, that of nudity simplified to the extreme. Here, the prominence of the sexual organs of an African statue in wood seems disturbing.

This exhibition that offers the visitor a true esthetical and intellectual experience is continued through the catalogue. Similar to an artistic book, the poems of Marcelin Mboko will be associated with a selection of 20 pieces of photography by Diane Bouchet and Pierre-Alain Ferrazzini.

L’article Insolite Nudity est apparu en premier sur Barbier-Mueller Museum.

Known for his portraits and nudes in a pared-down style, Huyhn has travelled around the planet to capture its beauty. He immersed himself in the museum storerooms, selecting and photographing a series of works from the collection, which he presents in dialogue with his own.

L’article Échos est apparu en premier sur Barbier-Mueller Museum.

These shields are more than just tools for protection, they have been used in battles, rituals, and social events. Each shield highlights the skill of the cultures that made them, transforming them into more than just defensive objects.

L’article Boucliers d’Afrique est apparu en premier sur Barbier-Mueller Museum.

The theme that connects them – scarifications – is a compelling one, no doubt because of the indelible mark that it conveys. This is what guided Miquel Barceló’s selection of his own pieces and the Musée Barbier-Mueller’s choices from its collections. The artist works his pieces like flesh that he scratches, deforms, tears, pricks and discolours. The “skins” of a Senufo anthropomorphic statuette, a Baule mask, a face-pendant from the kingdom of Benin, among others, have undergone similar procedures. But the designs that run through them attest to an act willed by tradition, a passage, a transformation.

Such mark-making and transformative actions are all expressions of an artistic or ritual practice. Creative gestures, signs of ownership, traces that have prophylactic, therapeutic, aesthetic or even erotic properties: the convergence of a myriad of visual experiences.

With the support of :

L’article Scarifications est apparu en premier sur Barbier-Mueller Museum.

The two artists have been given carte blanche; each in their own way asserts a strong and deeply personal link with non-Western arts, with the work and sensibility of artists and craftsmen, an intimacy with the works at the border between the visible and the invisible.

The exhibition Invisible Thoughts is accompanied by a new olfactory experience. Developed in the form of a scented candle by MARIEJEANNE (perfumer Georges Maubert from Grasse) from Okume wood, a fragrance evoking the scent of the forest and ritual ceremony accompanies the visitors’ journey.

Scented candle Invisible Toughts

L’article Invisible Thoughts est apparu en premier sur Barbier-Mueller Museum.

This project is built around comparisons between select pieces from the Barbier-Mueller collections and works that Jacques Kaufmann has produced in his studio and around the world, over a long stretch of time, the aim being to identify similarities – as well as differences – between them.

The exhibition juxtaposes works of different origins, time periods and materials, suggesting resonances but also inviting viewers to create their own connections. Ultimately, it is the viewer who “makes the picture”.

An encounter

A sanctuary of objects of varying origins, each one more remarkable than the last, the Musée Barbier-Mueller houses a collection that is recognized internationally as a leading centre for the so-called “primitive” – or “distant”– arts, depending on the terminology in use at different times.

Ceramics, which comes under the umbrella of contemporary art and its contextual practices, also looks for encounters with whatever produces continuities and disjunctions within human expression, across time and space. In the field of the arts, the past does not really pass. Forms are reactivated, re-emerge, reappropriate one other, come together again.

The disparities, connections, conjunctions, analogies, intervals between works allow us to perceive those things that might contribute to bringing about our long-term collective effort as humans to meet our fundamental spiritual needs. The endurance and movement of forms contradict the notion of progress in art.

This exhibition features in the program of the 50th Congress of the International Academy of Ceramics (IAC), organized by swissceramics, which will be held at the Geneva International Congress Centre from 12^th to 16^th September 2022 on the theme “Melting Pot. From the Alchemical Crucible to the Cultural Crucible”. This event is accompanied by 35 major exhibitions organized by partner museums and galleries in Romandie.

Exhibition catalogue>

L’article Subtle distinctions and connections est apparu en premier sur Barbier-Mueller Museum.

Now exhibited for the first time at the Musée Barbier-Mueller in its entirety, this is the most important known assemblage of Dong Son art outside the Vietnamese national collections. It consists of prestige and sacred objects, weapons and adornments, all bearing witness to a culture that takes its name from the village of Dong Son in the province of Thanh Hoa, in the north of present-day Vietnam, where many archaeological remains have been unearthed. These objects, as well as those found in many other sites, are evidence of an intense artistic activity responding to the needs of the aristocracy of kingdoms that settled in the valleys of the Red, Ma and Black rivers, which afforded them wealth and a means of communication.

Flourishing between the fourth century BCE and the fourth century CE over a fairly extensive area, the Dong Son culture produced an art and a style that are quite distinct and yet at the same time very often steeped in the traditions of neighbouring southern China. Dong Son pieces – or pieces resembling Dong Son work – have been found in mainland and island Southeast Asia, particularly in Thailand, Cambodia and Indonesia: the result of commercial and technical exchanges that took place in this geographical region and that suggest the existence of “Dong Son traditions” here.

Invitation card to the exhibition opening

Catalogue

The catalogue of the exhibition is being published in French. The texts and catalogue entries by Dr Van Viet Nguyen (director of the Centre for Southeast Asian Prehistory, Hanoi) offer a contextual reading and a stylistic description of the objects on display, while the contribution by Pierre Baptiste (senior curator at the Musée Guimet, Paris) provides a study of the ties between the Dong Son culture and China.

We hope that when visitors to the exhibition and readers of the catalogue see these pieces – their delicate lines and refined decoration the result of a remarkable technical mastery – they experience a delight similar to that felt by the collector Jean Paul Barbier-Mueller, who had a keen and long-held interest in them.

L’article Dong Son Art, Southeast Asia est apparu en premier sur Barbier-Mueller Museum.

The Musée Barbier-Mueller has invited the celebrated photographer Steve McCurry to set up a common exhibition conveying their shared values of openness to humanity and sensitivity to beauty. 

Steve McCurry explores the philosophy of wabi-sabi (the beauty of the imperfect, impermanence and incompleteness) through thirty of his works.

Combining images by the artist with objects from its collections, the Musée Barbier-Mueller looked at formal criteria. The resulting juxtapositions offer a new perspective on one of the most-recognized photographers in the world, creating echoes, both narrative and aesthetic.

Steve McCurry Studios
Concept: Bonnie McCurry V’Soske
In collaboration with Biba Giacchetti and Sudest 57

The catalogue

A catalogue in English and French with high quality reproductions of and explanations on Steve McCurry photos and objects of the Musée Barbier-Mueller on display accompanies the exhibition. Available at the museum bookshop or online.

Interview of Steve McCurry

Watch the Instagram Live interview of Steve McCurry for the opening of the exhibition on 15 December 2020. The master photographer talks with Holly Roussell, independent curator and museologist specializing in photography. He tells us about his collaboration with the museum, their joint exhibition and the accompanying exhibition catalogue while commenting some of his photos to share the story behind them.

L’article Steve McCurry & Musée Barbier-Mueller est apparu en premier sur Barbier-Mueller Museum.