Das Stillleben ist eine Bilderfindung, in der Objekte der Natur und des alltäglichen Lebens in verführerischer Schönheit erfasst und wiedergegeben werden. Zugleich beinhaltet das Stillleben über das Dargestellte hinaus stets eine verschlüsselte Botschaft. Zwischen der dinglichen Opulenz, die die Freuden und Genüsse des Lebens vor Augen führt, und dem Hinweis auf die Vergänglichkeit liegt die ganze Tragweite des Motivs. Deutlich wird: Natur ist unaufhaltsame Metamorphose, ein ewiger Kreislauf von Werden und Blüte, Vergehen und Tod.
Die Ausstellung "Still bewegt" setzt in 21 Filmen von 9 Künstlern die traditionelle Gattung gleichsam "in Bewegung". In den vergangenen 13 Jahren entstanden, erweisen sich diese Videos als ein bislang nicht gezeigtes Kompendium von beeindruckender Dichte.

Alle Künstler beziehen sich in ihren Filmen letztendlich auf die Stillleben der Alten Meister, also auf die „reinen“ Ursprungsmotive. Entsprechend geschieht dies nicht mittelbar durch einen vergleichenden Blick auf Stillleben des 19. oder 20. Jahrhunderts, sondern durch die Hinzunahme früher Stillleben vor allem des 17. Jahrhunderts, etwa von Gerrit Willemsz. Heda, Frans Snyders, Georg Flegel oder Abraham Mignon. Dabei setzt die Ausstellung die malerische und motivische Innovation dieser großen Stilllebenepoche mit den avantgardistischen Ausdrucksformen des Films in Relation.

Christoph Brech - Gabriella Gerosa - Ori Gersht - Pia Maria Martin - Stefanie Pöllot - Agnieszka Polska - Sam Taylor-Johnson - Wouter Verhoeven - Arnold von Wedemeyer -

Franz Gertsch (born 1930) belongs amongst Switzerland’s most important contemporary artists. He achieved international fame with, partly oversize, fotorealistic paintings and woodcuts. The exhibition at Museum Sinclair-Haus displays a representative selection (around 70 works) of his woodcuts dating from 1986 to 2008.
Gertsch organically developed his landscape images from the portraits, as all of nature’s shape-generation exhibits common structures. This development is considered in the exhibition, with each of the earliest and the youngest woodcut showing portraits. Via photographic templates the landscapes are taken directly from the real environment, and through their implementation they acquire an immaterial air that transforms their image into an atmospheric field of colour. Behind a permeable screen of monochrome colour the woodcuts’ subjects continuously appear as if detached from this earth.
Franz Gertsch’s Woodcuts are marked by a prolonged process of creation. Thus time is of equal importance as subject and colour as one of the three crucial components of his work.
This exhibition, devised in cooperation with Franz Gertsch, documents the essence of his work in a concentrated selection of works.

Franz Gertsch -

The exhibition “In Light of the Infinite – Romanticism and the Present” explores aspects of Romanticism in contemporary art. In diverse artistic positions, including photographs, installations and videos by artists ranging from Marina Abramovic to José Maria Mellado and Bill Viola, the exhibition will explore contemporary artists’ romantic view of the world, people and art. According to a definition provided by Charles Baudelaire in 1848, “Anyone talking about Romanticism is talking about modern art, i.e. the intimacy, the spirituality, the colour and the search for the infinite - expressed through all of the means available to art”. Although the forms and images, as well as the means and the possibilities, have changed considerably, the desire to create art that can change the world is still just as much alive today as is the desire to personally experience becoming one with nature in an attempt to counterbalance the material world with something transcendental, the functional with something mysterious and the banal with something meaningful.

Hiroyuki Masuyama - Kris Martin - Elger Esser - Darren Almond - José Maria Mellado - Mariele Neudecker - Marina Abramović - Bill Viola - Alec Soth - Susanna Majuri - Christoph Brech - Melanie Wiora - [Nils-Udo Laas] Nils-Udo -
Curator Johannes Janssen -