Tous les deux ans, il revient au Club jurassien des Arts de présenter, dans l'ancien bâtiment du Musée, des artistes sélectionnés par son comité. Depuis les dernières éditions, le choix de Carte Blanche se fait de manière collective, afin de donner plus d'unité à l'ensemble. Cette année, les œuvres présentées sont principalement des installations.

The exhibition’s chronological and thematic concept
The exhibition includes a select group of works demonstrating the significance and development of the important mountain and pyramid motifs in Paul Klee’s art. In Greek mythology, Mount Parnassus was the home of Apollo, God of music and poetry, and of the Muses. The mountain – as an Alpine peak or, in its abstract form, as a pyramid – is a pictorial leitmotif running through Paul Klee’s oeuvre. It symbolises a desire to accomplish artistic goals, a yearning for travel and for the encounter of other cultures. Ad Parnassum represents the ‘crown jewel’ amongst the pointillist-style paintings that Klee produced in 1931 and 1932 while discharging his professorial duties at the State Academy of Fine Arts in Düsseldorf. The exhibition spotlights this technique, which is characterised by the application of paint using tiny brushstrokes – a method originally championed by Georges Seurat and Paul Signac in their late-Impressionist paintings some fifty years beforehand. Soon afterwards, though, Klee was to challenge the artistic and compositionally accomplished perfection of the masterpiece Ad Parnassum through a series of radically impulsive, rapidly executed sketches in which he appeared to be questioning the need to strive for mastery and excellence: in 1933 he produced a sequence of expressive drawings as a reaction to the National Socialists’ seizure of power.

Klee emigrated to Bern, and in 1935 came the first signs that all was not well with his health; the debilitating illness from which he was suffering was to lead inexorably to his death in 1940. The last three years of his life saw the artist increasingly gripped by an obsession to paint: he produced in excess of 2000 works, amongst them large numbers of hastily executed drawings and numerous large paintings.

The exhibition will also explore Klee’s preoccupation with the structure and morphology of plants, and their growth patterns and metamorphoses in nature. Klee collected plants as he moved about, preserving them carefully in little frames and cases made especially for them, or adding them to his herbarium. His close interest in nature can be witnessed in early studies in his botanical school books, which he peppered with leaves from his herbarium and other items; it can also be seen in his descriptions of plants from his time as a Bauhaus teacher, as well as in a number of works of art. Trees – which Klee saw as representing an ideal in terms of vegetative growth and a metaphor for the process of artistic creation – occupy a special position both in Klee’s thinking and in his creative output. The exhibition will draw on specific examples to demonstrate the diversity of form and content of this particular aspect of Klee’s oeuvre.

Klee’s “dialogue” with nature paved the way for the imaginary plant worlds he conjured up in parallel to nature, as it were. Klee’s gardens are products of his artistic fantasy – magical and dreamlike, exotically peculiar, at times even threatening, and surpassing anything we can conceive of in terms of a contemplative floral idyll. What emerges from the diversity of Klee’s paintings and the titles he gives them is a kind of botanical panopticism. The plants frequently sport anthropomorphic features or become creatures with physiognomies and feelings. As such, Klee’s gardens represent settings for actors in a “botanical theatre” (the title of one of Klee’s most famous works). The exhibition will be presenting this wealth of imaginary botanicals in the form of groups of works featuring fantastic rock, fruit and flower gardens, oriental, tropical and mythological gardens as well as places of pleasure and magic.

The cornerstone of the exhibition is Paul Klee’s key work Angelus Novus, which served as Walter Benjamin’s visual allegory for his ‘angel of history’. Our exhibition "Lost Paradise" means to follow the horrified gaze of the angel as he looks down upon the calamities of the world from the vantage point of heaven. We have extremely fortunate circumstances to thank for the precious work being able to make the trip from the Israel Museum in Jerusalem to the Zentrum Paul Klee. Complementing it will be some one hundred and fifty works by artists past and present depicting the flipside of "Klee’s Enchanted Garden": the wreckage of progress, the world of destruction, erratically meandering individuals, life stripped bare – as well as the repeated attempts to visualise what the poet Rilke called the “totgeglaubte Park” (the park presumed dead) and place oneself in the lost paradise. The artist-couple Gerda Steiner and Jörg Lenzlinger are overseeing the excrescence of a plant-like work consisting of leaf-laden bowers, distressed fruit and award-winning apples, with arboreal eruptions, irregular lights and samba merry-making till girls, crystal growths, deer antlers and hydrangea, horse manure-like tubers, funny looking shrivelled cacti, flying seeds and bluebells fashioned out of Novilan. This space-filling, intermingled amalgamation of an installation can be seen proliferating along the Zentrum Paul Klee’s Museum Street, out into Paul Klee’s Enchanted Garden and down to the Lost Paradise.

Paul McCarthy will be subverting the otherwise harmonious landscape sculpture of the Zentrum Paul Klee with his installation Complex Shit – a giant pile of dog faeces. The old barn will be neighboured by the immensely tall and fully functional Wellness Skull by Joep van Lieshout, which will be hosting an extensive programme of videos. The row of houses along the stream will be assuming a new guise courtesy of Basel-based artists Claudia and Julia Müller, and Lake Egelsee itself is to be transformed into a highly original art venue. As for the idyllic lakeside path – it is to be clad in a new raiment of flowers courtesy of Bern’s Botanical Gardens. Hanging in the trees will be mysterious sound sculptures by the artist Pierre Huyghes, and – our artistic contribution to the Euro 2008 football championships – the greenspace will feature an extensive football ground entirely devoid of goalmouths. The Zentrum Paul Klee is indebted to the Euro 08 Bern Association for its support in this venture.

The exhibition will show the most recent of Balthasar Burkhard’s photographs which were taken in Seville in the spring of 2007.
The nudes of the artistes and artists have a timeless quality in an undefined space as if they were visions or remembered images of mystical beauties. Their appearance is also a herald of their vanishing.
The nude photographs are reminiscent of the old masters and the long-past traditional studio situation. The nameless women stand on lengths of cloth with the draped folds around their naked feet exhibiting a telluric structure. It seems as though the backdrop and the ground are transformed into a landscape marred by erosion.
The title Songlines denotes the invisible lines that crisscross the entire continent of Australia and hark back to the old mythology of the aboriginal people. When in touch with a songline, an Aborigine begins to sing.
In the German translation, where “songlines” is translated as “dream paths”, the connection is made with the mythology of the Dream Time and the wandering of the nomadic tribes.
The British author Bruce Chatwin was also interested in this topic and in 1987 wrote a book of the same name in which he shows how the Lines represent songs that the Aborigines follow with singing.

In addition to the photographs of nudes, Balthasar Burkhard presents subjects elemental to nature. On the one hand, water is depicted as origin and source in the form of a waterfall flowing from stone (La Source, 1988). It appears as a rent in the skin of the Earth – and at the same time, as a trace left by history.
On the other hand, he illustrates elemental force by capturing photographically the power of a wave (Normandie, 1995). He catches the precise moment when the wave’s force is at its height before it falls back in rhythm with its ceaseless movement. The wave is only one example of the endless and recurrent cycle of nature.

Elemental, as in “Origin of the World”, is also the photograph L’Origine from 1988. In a close view, Balthasar Burkhard shifts the focus of the picture to the female sexual organs. The naked body is absorbed into the dark background and the opened thighs in the forefront of the picture channel the attention of the viewer.
The snail series Escargot (1992/93) challenges viewers to give their associations free reign. The small creatures open themselves up to the viewer in large-format propinquity. In this method of approach, the orifices and convolutions of their bodies become untouchable and yet vulnerable entities.

In all his motifs, Balthasar Burkhard retains the necessary detachment. A detachment that does not overstep the “line”. In addition to this he takes photographs from a very individual perspective: A perspective that uses light to reveal the subject while at the same time retaining the purity of gaze without dissembling.

The photographs are complemented by a space-filling large projection: The film Ciudad from 1999, a documentary work of art and also a modern symphony of the metropolis Mexico City. Black-and-white sequences alternate with those in colour, and aerial pictures with intimate insights into the life of the city. Upheaval and an uncontrolled growth become visible. People, machines, automobiles – everything rotates in a dispassionate world between heaven and earth.

Avec des oeuvres de : Vito Acconci, Stefan Banz, Marie José Burki, Erik Dettwiler, Hervé Graumann, Joan Jonas, L/B (Sabina Lang/Daniel Baumann), Les Levine, Chantal Michel, RELAX (chiarenza & hauser & co), Lydia Shouten, Bill Viola, Klaus vom Bruch, Pascale Wiedemann

Although she had been active artistically since her youth in addition to her profession as graphic artist and restorer, Mili Jäggi did not develop her own visual language in large-format gouaches until 1977-78. In a process lasting several months, sometimes years, she worked over irregularly cut strips of rough packing paper again and again with brushes, cloths and sponges until she was satisfied with the result - sometimes this process led to the disintegration of the material being worked on. In their meditative effect, the vibrant, sometimes quietly floating spaces of colour are very reminiscent of the paintings of Mark Rothko, even though they have been created based on quite different premises and are executed in different media.

In the abstract resonance of colour, the artist sought to attain something equivalent to her experiences, to what she has seen and lived through. For the realization of the colours she was searching for she availed herself of a kind of collection of various everyday objects: stones, fabrics and photographs from newspapers, catalogues or art books. The artist worked painstakingly towards incorporating the different colours. She began with red, brown and yellow tones and only in later years felt her way towards green and blue.

In their size and proportion, the gouaches awaken associations to human bodies on which the vicissitudes of life have left traces in the form of cracks and other signs of wear and tear. There is a dynamic contrast between the seemingly immaterial colour surfaces, appearing luminous from within, and the fragile, corporeal materiality of the base material which is expressed particularly in the intense working over of the edges of the pictures.

Curator: Samuel Vitali

Einen ersten Höhepunkt stellt die in der Schweiz einzigartige Werkgruppe italienischer Malerei des Trecento und Quattrocento dar, darunter als Schlüsselwerk die Maestà von Duccio di Buoninsegna. Die frühe Neuzeit ist mit herausragenden Werken der Berner Malerei von der Spätgotik bis zum Realismus des 19. Jahrhunderts vertreten, von Niklaus Manuel Deutsch über Joseph Heintz, Joseph Plepp, Albrecht Kauw und Joseph Werner bis hin zu Albert Anker, von dem das Kunstmuseum die bedeutendste Werkgruppe überhaupt besitzt. Die Bestände ab der Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts sind dagegen von internationalem Format: Die Entwicklung der modernen Kunst, vom Impressionismus bis zu Rothko und Pollock, kann fast lückenlos mit Meisterwerken veranschaulicht werden. Höhepunkte sind Einzelwerke von Manet, Cézanne, Monet, Pissarro, Renoir, van Gogh und Toulouse-Lautrec, die Werkgruppen zu Kubismus, Blauem Reiter, Brücke, Bauhaus und Surrealimus. Daneben sind natürlich Schweizer Künstler wie Ferdinand Hodler, Cuno Amiet und Giovanni Giacometti mit Hauptwerken aller Schaffensepochen vertreten. Auch nach dem Umzug der Paul-Klee-Stiftung ins neue Zentrum wird Paul Klee im Kunstmuseum immer noch mit ausserordentlichen Beispielen seines Schaffens präsent sein.

Ein Schwerpunkt des Museums ist weiter das Sammeln und Erforschen so genannter Outsider-Kunst. Einer ihrer weltweit prominentesten Vertreter ist der ehemalige Berner Bauernknecht Adolf Wölfli (1864-1930), dessen Nachlass von der 1975 gegründeten Adolf Wölfli-Stiftung betreut wird. Das Kunstmuseum Bern gehört zu den wenigen öffentlichen Sammlungen in der Schweiz, die seit langem explizit Kunst von Frauen fördern. Dafür stehen Namen wie Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Louise Bourgeois, Meret Oppenheim und Marina Abramovic. Zeitgenössische Positionen sind durch umfangreiche Werkgruppen von Bernhard Luginbühl, Franz Gertsch, James Lee Byars, Markus Raetz, Urs Lüthi, Dieter Roth oder Sigmar Polke vertreten.