Vergangene Veranstaltungen › Ausstellung / Exposition / Exhibition

The Kunsthaus Biel is dedicating a tribute to the artist, art historian and curator Stefan Banz (1961-2021), who died in 2021. Following his last major exhibition here at the Kunsthaus in 2006, Stefan Banz, Malereien is focussing exclusively on his pictorial work and is showing around 15 paintings created between 2018 and 2021. These small-format paintings, painted in a very vibrant colour palette, reveal a number of the artist's obsessions, in particular his exploration of pictorial quotation and language. They also point to his passion for art history.

Debbie Alagen (*1997) develops his artistic practice around symbols located at the interface between private and public, between mental space and the outside world. His works utilise various strategies to penetrate the unconscious gears of our mental worlds: Shifts in perception, recourse to the haptic qualities of certain materials or even the careful arrangement of a symbolism of intimacy, control or transition. In the Kunsthaus, the artist is carrying out a kind of introspection with a new installation that challenges visitors' curiosity.

The works of Sveta Mordovskaya (*1989) are mostly compositions made of simple materials that simultaneously testify to a process of dissection and fusion. They include various objects found on the street, as well as mirrors, dolls and even straw. The roughness of these assemblages evokes associations that are either affective in nature or relate to a socio-political context. The trained photographer also integrates images from her personal archive into the exhibition, which continue the problems of her sculpture in a critical and humorous way.

The paintings of Stephen Felton (*1975) are initially astonishing in their simplicity. The individual freehand drawings on large-format canvas display a reduced colour palette and testify to an obvious speed of execution. This simultaneously gestural and fragmentary work is reminiscent of children's drawings and cave paintings as well as a kind of softly drawn pictogram, somewhere between symbol and icon, figuration and abstraction. Stephen Felton's series are usually inspired by a theme or a book, the grandiloquence of which contrasts with the means the artist uses for his painting. The exhibition at the Kunsthaus thus derives its iconography from treatises on various approaches to black magic that the artist has collected over several years.

PRICE (*1986) works in the field of performance as well as visual art and superimposes different spaces in his work: theatre stage, club, catwalk or exhibition space. For the Kunsthaus, PRICE has created an olfactory installation in the large Salle Poma. The white cube, whose sterile minimalism is typical of standardised spaces (such as offices or airports), is transformed here - confronted with domestic kitsch - into an ambiguous place.  This visual permeability between the public and private spheres is reinforced by the olfactory dimension: while an industrial fan continuously emits the characteristic odour of cleaning agents and room fresheners, delicate perfumes with erotic connotations emanate from flacons, alluding to the feelings of the visitors.

Delphine Coindet (*1969) entwickelt seit zwanzig Jahren Skulpturen, die sich über ihre eigene Ambivalenz definieren. Manche ihrer Werke sind an eine bestimmte Art von Design, Architektur oder Theaterkulisse angelehnt. Andere Werke scheinen dem Bildschirm entsprungen, wie Symbole und Visualisierungen, die sich hier im realen Raum manifestieren. Diese befremdliche plastische Ausdrucksweise dient verschiedenen Narrationen, sowohl politisch als auch persönlich. Jede ihrer Ausstellungen bietet der Künstlerin die Gelegenheit einer spezifischen Inszenierung neuer Produktionen, wobei sie ältere Arbeiten recycelt und sie so in neuer Zusammensetzung zeigt. Ihre Ausstellung Autofriction in der Salle Poma vereint einen Teil ihrer jüngsten Werke in einer Gesamtinstallation. Dieses Prinzip monumentaler und retrospektiver Ansammlung erinnert an bedeutende Aktionen der Avantgarde – von Kurt Schwitters Merzbau bis zu Maurizio Cattelans All. Coindets Vorschlag kommt hingegen weniger demonstrativ und mächtig daher. Wie es der Titel andeutet (vom frz. Selbst-Reibung, Wortspiel mit Autofiction), bevorzugt die Künstlerin eine spielerische Herangehensweise, die von einer gewissen ironischen Distanzierung zeugt.

Die Mailänder Künstlerin Fausta Squatriti (*1941) ist seit den 1960er Jahren eine wichtige Figur der italienischen Avantgarde. Die Ausstellung im Kunsthaus zeichnet über sechs Jahrzehnte ihres Schaffens nach, von der Bilderserie La Passeggiata di Buster Keaton (1964–1966), die an Pop Art und Rokoko erinnert, bis zu den jüngsten exzentrischen Assemblagen aus Materialien wie Holz, Perlen, Stoff und Harz der Corpi celesti vaganti (2022–2023). Während die abstrakten Bilder der 1980er Jahre streng geometrische Linien mit Ornamentik verbinden, oszillieren die farbigen Skulpturen der Serie sculture colorate (1964–1974) zwischen Pop und Minimalismus. Die künstlerische Praxis von Fausta Squatriti zeugt von einem grossen Formenreichtum und – in mehreren Serien – einem gewissen Hang zu kosmischen Träumereien. Die Ausstellung zeigt ausserdem ihre ersten abstrakten Arbeiten auf Papier: weiche, farbenfrohe Zeichnungen, die Ende der 1950er Jahre entstanden sind, einer Zeit, in der die ungegenständliche Kunst in Westeuropa sehr ausgeprägt war. Squatriti stand Künstlerinnen wie Max Ernst, Man Ray, Lucio Fontana, Niki de Saint-Phalle oder Enrico Baj nahe. Mit einigen hat sie Künstlerbücher und Multiples herausgegeben, wovon eine Auswahl in der Ausstellung zu sehen ist.

Pauline Curnier Jardin (*1980) presents in an immersive site-specific installation in the Salle Poma a showing of the video work Bled Out (2019). This film is a free adaptation of the short film Un Chant d'Amour [A Love Song] (1950) by Jean Genet with the following plot: in a prison, isolated inmates communicate their mutual desires from one cell to another under the eye of a guard who is half accomplice and half torturer.

The Kunsthaus is showing a major exhibition by the Californian artist Liz Craft (*1970), focusing on her work of the last ten years. Her sculptures and figurative installations appear to tell fragments of stories whose dreamy atmosphere can be associated with surrealism, fairy tales or drug hallucinations.

The exhibition by Mathis Altmann (*1987) in the Salle Poma of the Kunsthaus Pasquart is a continuation of the one in the independent exhibition space La Salle de bains in Lyon, which differs from the Salle Poma above all in its size: It measures barely 20 m2. The works, which already attract attention through their miniaturisation and hypnotic effects, can be experienced here in a radically altered size ratio. Mathis Altmann's work is based on a critical observation of the physiognomy of today's metropolises, above all Berlin. The artist settled there a few years ago, just as this emblematic city of alternative culture was experiencing an acceleration process of gentrification and standardisation of lifestyles triggered by urban redevelopment plans. Altmann explores, against the backdrop of the rising influence of capitalism, personal and collective uses of space in work, home and leisure, pointing to our confusion between desire and morality. This is expressed in the sometimes rough, sometimes smooth forms of his assemblages of object, image and text. They borrow theories from economics and are peppered with references to fashion, architecture and underground culture.

The Kunsthaus Pasquart is showing an extensive exhibition of Daniel Pommereulle's (1937-2003) work, the first outside France for almost 40 years. It brings together over a hundred works, including several that have never been shown before. From his first paintings in his early years to his subversive "Objets" and his simple drawings shortly before his death, his works are like "moments" that trace the path of an artist whose research always kept him on the move.  Pommereulle was a painter, sculptor, filmmaker, performer and poet. With his diversity of forms, he developed an aesthetic of violence and cruelty that was equally influenced by his traumatic experiences in the Algerian war and by the surrealist legacy and ideas of Antonin Artaud. Through his appearances in films of the Nouvelle Vague, Pommereulle also gained notoriety in the cinema. In Éric Rohmer's film La Collectionneuse (1967), he presented his first Objet Hors Saisie [Undetectable Object], which he developed further with the series of Objets de prémonition [Objects of Premonition] (1975): upturned buckets of paint and lead sculptures, with knife blades and other pointed objects. As an artist, he explored boundaries, was an activist during the May 68 revolt and made two films, one of which, Vite (1969), was shot in the Sahara with his friends from the groupe Zanzibar, before deliberately shutting down his artistic practice for several years. From the 1980s onwards, Pommereulle created a new kind of sculpture that used all the powers of glass, stone and iron to "capture the energy of light" and thus combine sharpness and softness, calmness and vertigo.

«Snow Dancing» is the name of an early-90s exhibition and book by artist Philippe Parreno. «… im kalten Polar» is a reference to the song «Eisbär» by the legendary Bernese band Grauzone. Under this enigmatic title, three art spaces from the Bieler scene have been given a carte blanche to conceive a project within the building’s grandiose Salle Poma. Through a series of gestures, the three spaces host a sort of institutional critique that is both generous and humourous. Beginning with a big party on the night of the fourth to the fifth of February....

Francis Baudevin, born in Bulle in 1964, has been developing, since the end of the 1980s a body of abstract work that is known to be rigorous, coherent and playful. Always following the same method, the artist takes abstract graphic compositions from our visual domain (logos, packaging, record covers etc.), and then removes all text references – hence, all meaning –, to keep only the form itself. All that remain are geometric shapes and flat areas of colour. Though one may recognise the initial reference – often indicated by the painter’s title –, these variations end up revealing unexpected similarities to iconic abstract works of art. In the process of deconstructing a logo, one can be surprised to find parallels with some of the most radical approaches – from Malevich to Mondrian or Barnett Newman. With a certain sense of irony, but never cynicism, Baudevin’s work offers, in its own way, a commentary on the migration of signs, the recycling of the avant-garde and the visual organisation of today’s consumer society.