Special Exhibitions

Fiona Tan

Rise and Fall
30 January - 18 April 2010

Fiona Tan is a sensitive and analytical witness of her time. Her contribution to last year’s Venice Biennale at the Dutch Pavilion drew a great deal of attention. Bringing together Tan’s most recent work in photography and film, as well as selected drawings, in a large-scale presentation, the exhibition Rise and Fall at the Aargauer Kunsthaus is the first comprehensive survey of the artist’s work in Switzerland.
Born in Indonesia and raised in Australia, Fiona Tan has been living in the Netherlands for over twenty years now. Straddling the East-West divide, she embarks on a journey to trace her own roots in her documentary film May You Live in Interesting Times (1997). A preoccupation with memory and history thematically underpins her artistic practice. Her more recent photographic works and video pieces, such as Rise and Fall (2009), Provenance (2008) or A Lapse of Memory (2007), revolve as much around issues of identity and belonging as around remembering and forgetting. In her double-projection video piece Rise and Fall the artist examines the retrospective gaze and its relationship to the images we carry within ourselves.
In her video pieces and photographic works Fiona Tan is invariably concerned with the image of an individual and the way in which this individual relates to his or her environment and thus to the world. Captured in fascinating images, Fiona Tan creates moving portraits of people, while subtly linking personal sentiments to their social and cultural context.
The exhibition Rise and Fall is a joint project with the Vancouver Art Gallery. Following its presentation at the Aargauer Kunsthaus in Aarau the exhibition will be on view at the Vancouver Art Gallery in Vancouver and will subsequently travel to the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery in Washington D.C. and the Galerie de l’UQAM in Montréal.


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Hugo Suter

Photographs 1969-2009
30 January - 18 April 2010

Born in 1943 in Aarau, the multifaceted work of Hugo Suter has gained recognition through numerous museum and gallery exhibitions. The artist’s in-depth inquiry into image-making was presented in the 1970s under the rubric of “the drawing mindset,” and his ongoing preoccupation with the lake he has lived at for more than thirty years now (the Hallwiler-See), as well as his work with glass, has garnered him wide acclaim. Surprisingly, photography, along with a wide variety of media and techniques, is a consistently recurring medium throughout his entire career. However, Suter does not use the camera as a means of imagemaking, but rather as a working tool in his ongoing perception and cognition research. Frequently, his small-scale, journal-like pictures will first record something that will subsequently become the focus of larger-scale works. The present exhibition highlights the importance of photography within his oeuvre, thus drawing attention to a hitherto neglected aspect of his art.


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Abstractions II

Non-Representative Tendencies in the Collection
30 January - 1 August 2010

In the past decades the Aargauer Kunsthaus has expanded its collection of constructive, concrete and radical art through acquisitions and generous donations. The museum’s rich holdings allow for ever-new dialogues to be set up between
works.
The current presentation focuses on the issue of artistic form vacillating between rigid structure and free-flowing form, between strict order and accidental moments, between rest and movement. Works of classic Modernism by Hans Arp, Sophie Taeuber-Arp and Hans Richter provide a starting point. Also included are works associated with concrete art – from Richard Paul Lohse and Verena Loewensberg to Friedrich Glarner. Within the exhibition, informal painting contrasts geometric form with painterly gesture, construction with movement and the controlled application of paint with the flow of paint. In addition the exhibition includes works – by artists from Walter Linck to Jean Tinguely – in which movement enters art as a driving engine. The trajectory leads from here straight into the present in which the field of possibilities to override existing pictorial arrangements seems boundless.
The exhibition also includes the work Zimmer by Beat Zoderer which, as a gift from the Kulturwegstiftung Baden-Wettingen-Neuenhof to mark the anniversary of the Aargauer Kunsthaus, will be shipped to Aarau and temporarily installed in the Rathausgarten.


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CARAVAN 1/2010: Nathalie Bissig

Series of exhibition of young art
30 January - 18 April 2010

Nathalie Bissig’s creativity expresses itself both in drawings and in photography; in previous exhibitions the artist would frequently combine the two media. Drawing allows her to express what cannot be depicted by means of photography. In her drawings she contrasts photography, as a reflection of the external world, with fleeting images of an inner world. Fascinated with the mountainscapes of Caspar Wolf (1735-1783) and the fantastic figure paintings of John Henry Fuseli (1741-1825), the artist decided, in planning the CARAVAN exhibition, to juxtapose her works for once not with her own photographs, but rather have them enter into a dialogue with older works from the museum’s collection.


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Ugo Rondinone

The Night of Lead
13 May - 1 August 2010

Both nationally and internationally, Ugo Rondinone (*1963) is one of the most noted contemporary Swiss artists. But whereas institutions around the world regularly devote major exhibitions to his work, Rondinone’s last solo show in this country dates back eleven years. The Aargauer Kunsthaus’s large-scale
exhibition Ugo Rondinone – The Night of Lead finally ends this long hiatus by presenting a comprehensive selection of works from recent years as well as a number of new works.
The New York-based artist works in a variety of media and art forms – sculpture, painting, sound installation, installation art, collage –, with his entire output being suffused by poetry. For his exhibition at the Aargauer Kunsthaus the artist has opted, rather than showing his varied works isolated from one another, to present them as three-dimensional “total images,” like atmospheric stage sets or seductive universes. The eponymous novel that the exhibition title references, Hans Henny Jahnn’s Die Nacht aus Blei, serves as his source of inspiration. The novel relates how a man, while roaming around a city during a “leaden” winter night, encounters his own younger self.
In the narrative, psychological and metaphysical dimensions overlap and the distinction between past and present is erased. Following the story, Ugo Rondinone’s powerful installations oscillate between dreamlike landscapes and actual spaces. At the Aargauer Kunsthaus the artist transforms the galleries on two floors into a comprehensive stage-like ensemble in which anything seems possible.
The exhibition was organised in conjunction with the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León in Spain and with the generous support of Gallery Eva Presenhuber, Zurich.

Opening: Wednesday, 12 May 2010, 6 pm

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