ROBERT MOTHERWELL - Game of Chance - selected prints
16.05 - 20.06.2026
Many artistic milestones of the 20th century – works and movements such as Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, Malevich’s Black Square, the Blue Rider group, or Black Mountain College – are celebrating or approaching their centennials.
The 2030s will also shape new movements in art. Epochal change is reflected here. What comes next? Where will we gather? Continuity in times of upheaval lies in the work of artists: no matter what, they remain in the studio.
Around 100 years ago, it became clear that the world’s attention would shift toward American painters. The transition from Paris to New York as the center of art was prepared by major collections such as that of Albert Barnes.
Bernard Jacobson describes this as a migration of painting itself, culminating in Clement Greenberg’s claim that the premises of Western art had moved to the United States.
We know the artists who followed: Helen Frankenthaler, Robert Motherwell, Barnett Newman, among others.
A Robert Motherwell exhibition is long overdue. His work is groundbreaking in printmaking and collage, offering renewed engagement with perception and thought. His practice embodies the Peintre-Graveur concept: experience is layered and transformed into nonverbal, nonlinear knowledge on canvas.
Motherwell’s connection to John Cage, including the 1948 journal possibilities, is key. A drawing intended for its unrealized second issue became the origin of his major series Elegy to the Spanish Republic. Serial work, reflection, and printmaking define his oeuvre, especially after 1972.
He uniquely treated printmaking as equal in importance to his other work. Collage plays a central role, its force extending into his prints and remaining relevant today.
His concept of the “After Image” refers to invisible references: traces of art, literature, and experience embedded within the work. Each image carries residues of other works or moments – a layered visual and intellectual presence.
This forms a painterly-philosophical idea: the artwork as a site of memory and relation. Motherwell also incorporated everyday materials – papers, labels, packaging – into his compositions. In John Cage’s writings, he recognized a similar collage method: a network of quotations and associations creating richer dimensions than linear narrative.
Cunnigham Capsule
16.05 - 06.06.2026
Merce Cunningham was born in 1919 in the U.S. state of Washington—two years before Joseph Beuys, seven years after John Cage, and nine years before Andy Warhol. He is considered one of the most influential choreographers of the 20th century. His research and innovations in shaping and expressing meaningful movement of the human body are unique. His lifelong collaboration with the composer John Cage, as well as with numerous visual artists, is legendary. The dancers of his company honored him with deep respect and admiration. In total, Merce Cunningham created more than 180 choreographies and over 500 events.
The Merce Cunningham Dance Company was founded in the summer of 1953 at Black Mountain College. His approach was revolutionary—ideologically simple and at the same time physically highly complex. The opening of the body inward and into space, evident in his works, is still regarded as groundbreaking today. As Carolyn Brown, his longtime “top dancer,” put it: “Dancing is a spiritual exercise in physical form.”
Carolyn Brown’s perspective is brought to life in the exhibition, among other ways, through unpublished photographs by Saul Leiter from her estate. Her accounts of the time with Cage, Cunningham, Rauschenberg, and Johns are fascinating testimonies of a monumental era of the 20th century that fundamentally transformed dance, art, music, and theater.
Carolyn Brown was a dancer, choreographer, filmmaker, and teacher. She was one of Cunningham’s most important collaborators and stood in front of Saul Leiter’s camera: “Remy suggested that I try high-fashion modeling. He brought along a friend—Saul Leiter, a painter who supported himself with commercial photography—and he took photographs of me.”
A little over a year ago, Carolyn Brown passed away. In her book Chance and Circumstance, she quotes a text by John Cage from 1955, written for the performance of Springweather and People. In it, Cage describes Merce Cunningham as a researcher and pioneer with a clear structure:
“…his own school of dance and choreography, whose continuity no longer depends on linear elements—neither narrative nor psychological—and not on movement toward or away from a climax. As in abstract painting, it is assumed that an element (a movement, a sound, a change in light) is expressive in itself; what it communicates is largely determined by the observer. It is assumed that dance sustains itself and does not require support from music. … As for the individual movements, they are both derived and discovered; derived from both ballet and modern dance, and discovered as results of Cunningham’s ongoing search and refinement of his sense of movement.”
Decades later, Carolyn Brown regarded John Cage as the best mediator and interpreter of Cunningham’s work. His words remain relevant even half a century later and must be continually reaffirmed, as audiences continue to be surprised and captivated by the creativity and artistic power of this choreographer.
One of the groundbreaking innovations in stage design is highlighted through Carolyn Brown’s descriptions:
“Space, as the title Summerspace suggests, was Cunningham’s central choreographic concern in this piece. In his explorations of movement, Cunningham sought steps and phrases that carry the dancers through space, not just into it. There were twenty-one different spatial pathways—horizontal, diagonal, or circular—leading from and to three entrances and exits on each side of the stage. The movements were mostly continuous and often fast. … In selecting the spatial possibilities for Summerspace, Cunningham avoided the center of the stage, except as an area the dancers might pass through.”
This revolution in stage spatial design continues to fascinate to this day. The artistic practice of Lena Grossmann is an independent reflection on this bodily intelligence. Her work Mimetic Practice is part of the exhibition and invites artistic engagement.
Merce Cunningham and John Cage were extraordinary contemporaries. It is therefore hardly surprising that Cunningham’s drawings predominantly focus on the animal world. Perhaps this also reflects his view of humans as beings who move between, occupy, possess, relinquish, and explore spaces—abilities that animals, as living beings in motion, also possess.
