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.

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.

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 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.

Jean Dubuffet discovered them in 1945 in the studio of the Japanese pedestal maker Inagaki. Fascinated by these strange creations with a striking family resemblance, he baptized them all “Barbus Müller”, probably after the beard that certain pieces sport and the name of Josef Müller, who had acquired the greatest number of them. He published them in a small leaflet, which contains the founding text on his concept of Art Brut (reissued as an insert in the exhibition catalogue). He also organized an exhibition in 1947 at the Foyer de l’Art Brut in Paris. He later acquired three pieces of this kind.

Nothing was known about these statues. When Josef Müller acquired them, they were described as “Celtic heads in stone, Vendée”, but various provenances were attributed to them over time, including the Americas and Oceania. They were even said to be the work of a self-taught sculptor.

The riddle now appears to be solved. Thanks to a detailed study conducted by the passionate Bruno Montpied, the identity of the sculptor has been revealed (for some of these Barbus Müller at least).

Assembling some twenty Barbus from its own collection and from private and public lenders, the Musée Barbier-Mueller has juxtaposed them with works from faraway cultures selected from its collections, in order to assess the resemblances and differences. They will fraternize as they once did before Josef Müller’s eyes and in his storeroom.

With the support of a Geneva private foundation.

A Partnership with

Within the framework of a partnership between the Musée Barbier-Mueller and the Musée d’Ethnographie de Genève reflecting the connection between their respective temporary exhibitions, a Barbu Müller from the Barbier-Mueller collection will take up residence at the exhibition “Jean Dubuffet, a Barbarian in Europe” from September 8, 2020 to February 28, 2021, after being exhibited at the Musée Barbier-Mueller. From September 8, 2020 to February 28, 2021, the ticket for admission to the Musée Barbier-Mueller will allow free entry to the MEG exhibition. More information at www.meg-geneve.ch.

Private Guided Tours

Over the exhibition, requests for private guided tours can be made to musee@barbier-mueller.ch or by calling 022 312 02 70.

Limited number of participants: 20

Rate: 150.-CHF
Entrance rate per person: 5.-CHF
Length: c. 1 hour

L’article The Barbus Müller est apparu en premier sur Barbier-Mueller Museum.

At their most basic, asen constitute a kind of portable altar that is planted in the ground of the asenxo (asen house) where the deceased members of the family are memorialized and recalled in annual ceremonies, during which each is engaged. It is in front of the asen that the living will meet the dead, speak to them, interrogate them, and offer the sacrifices of propitiation. Many asen, including several featured in the exhibition, include a portrayal of a gourd container, or calabash. Such containers hold food used in offerings to the deceased at the time the asen is first installed. This also recalls an alternative name for asen in this area in southern Republic of Benin and Togo, namely sinuka (calabash to drink water, the calabash being the recipient that one uses ritually in libations for the ancestors).

Historically in this region, asen were also closely identified with healing, protection, and divination, as well as the transfer of knowledge from the spirit world to the earthly world in Vodun temples and other contexts. This function shifted toward a more specifically royal memorial use as the Dahomey court grew in power from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. In the Dahomey (Fon) court in Abomey, each king and the woman who personifies the ruler after his death was identified with a distinct asen. The royal asen were brought out during annual “custom” rites. Historically they were positioned near the djeho (spirit house of the king), and were secured in the ground outside the structure, each initially covered with a cloth. Once the cloth is removed, the asen is given libations and other offerings, including yam, corn, and beans, as well as incantations or songs.

The majority of the works in the Barbier-Mueller collection and featured in the exhibition were created in the coastal port city of Ouidah, many dating to the mid to late nineteenth century and, as such, earlier than those associated with the Dahomey court in Abomey, which were largely destroyed in the 1892–94 French colonial war. These were replaced by new forms commissioned by King Agoli Agbo between 1894 and 1900 from the royal guild of jewelers and smiths, the Hountondji family blacksmith guild.

L’article Asen: Forged Memories of Iron in Dahomey Vodun Art est apparu en premier sur Barbier-Mueller Museum.

Deeply affected in her youth by her visits to the Museum der Kulturen in Basel and the Musée de l’Homme in Paris, where large numbers of objects were piled up in the display cases, she came up with the idea of reconstituting on the ground floor of the museum Josef Mueller’s “reserve”, characterized by an accumulation of pieces in crates stacked from floor to ceiling. She describes what used to fascinate her at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris: “The stranger, the foreigner, the presence of the masks and statues and the heap of objects in the display cases. That heap, which I discovered with my own eyes, went unexplained—there were labels in French, of course, but I didn’t understand them at the time. The function or purpose of the objects remained unknown to me or was left to my imagination. The objects were simply there, calm and intense. I didn’t know anything about them. They were foreign, different, but they could speak without a word, through their presence. That presence that I seek tirelessly in my drawings. It’s the same internal light, very difficult to describe. Perhaps it can be sensed through the confrontation between the statues and masks from the Musée Barbier-Mueller and my drawings.”

Silvia Bächli brings 16 gouaches on paper by her own hand into dialogue with about 60 objects she has chosen from the reserves of the Musée Barbier-Mueller. The clear, simple, and pure forms of these masks, statuettes, vases, and shields, which display a formal correspondence with her works, called out to her.

This aesthetic encounter provides an opportunity to reflect on form, line, and contours. We would also like to encourage visitors to consider the status and function attributed to the works or objects once they are exhibited in a museum.

L’article Faraway Arts, So Close in Silvia Bächli’s Eyes est apparu en premier sur Barbier-Mueller Museum.

The Gan, neighbours of the Lobi, number about six thousand subjects, located in the south-west region of Burkina Faso. Their ancestors are said to have come from Ghana in the 15th century for political and religious reasons.

Armbands, amulets and other ritual objects, most of them animal representations, were dedicated to tutelary forces protecting the kingdom. They form a true royal bestiary that served as support of legends and histories, shaped and updated for each ancestor of a lineage thus honoured, dignitary of a then prosperous kingdom thanks to gold mining and trade.

L’article The Gan of Burkina Faso est apparu en premier sur Barbier-Mueller Museum.