Gurlitt: Status Report
Nazi Art Theft and its Consequences

Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn: GURLITT: STATUS REPORT
Nazi Art Theft and its Consequences
November 3, 2017 to March 11, 2018

Kunstmuseum Bern: GURLITT: STATUS REPORT
“Degenerate Art” – confiscated and sold
November 2, 2017 to March 4, 2018

The Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn and the Kunstmuseum Bern are collaborating in the organization of a concurrent double exhibition. The two exhibitions will, for the very first time, be focusing on a selection of works of art from the Cornelius Gurlitt estate. Under the title of Gurlitt: Status Report the two exhibitions will present Cornelius Gurlitt’s extensive art collection. Both shows are based on the latest research into “Gurlitt’s art trove” and seek to bring to light further evidence to help clarify the provenances of those works whose origins remain unknown.
In form and content, the exhibitions at the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn and at the Kunstmuseum Bern are closely coordinated. In Bern the focus lies on art that was considered “degenerate” and on works from the Gurlitt family circle. The Bundeskunsthalle, on the other hand, will concentrate on works of art that were taken from their owners as part of the Nazi persecution and on works whose provenance has not yet been established. Primarily, the exhibition in Bonn will shed light on the fate of the persecuted, mostly Jewish art collectors – and art dealers, juxtaposing their individual histories with the biographies of the Nazi perpetrators. Moreover the show homes in on the unprecedented theft of art by the Nazis in the occupied territories.

Achim Mohné – 0,0064 Megapixel
Planet Earth is blue and there‘s nothing I can’t do

5 November 2017 to 11 March 2018

Parallel to the United Nations Climate Change Conference, which takes place in Bonn in November 2017, and the exhibition Weather Report – About Weather Culture and Climate Science at the Bundeskunsthalle, the artist Achim Mohné presents a thematically related, large-scale work in the forecourt of the Bundeskunsthalle.
Mohné transposes Earthrise, the world-famous photograph of planet earth, from digital space into the physical space of the museum forecourt, by aligning the digital pixels of the image with a corresponding number of concrete floor tiles. He thus recreates a digital image as an analogue, large-scale mosaic composed of 6400 square floor tiles.

Weather Report
About Weather Culture
and Climate Science

7 October 2017 to 4 March 2018 

The weather – beautiful and threatening in equal measure – is always with us. Weather is climate made tangible, and the record of weather patterns over a period of thirty years can be read as a climate trend. Weather and climate determine our life and survival on earth. The exhibition asks to what extent short-term weather events and long-term climate change influence human civilisation and culture. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach to this highly topical subject, we are showing a wide range of objects, spanning art, cultural history and science from all over the world. Amongst many others the show includes art works by John Constable, William Turner, Gustave Courbet and Otto Modersohn, as well as scientific treasures by Otto von Guericke, Daniel Fahrenheit and Alfred Wegener. The history of meteorology and current aspects of global climate change play a central role in the exhibition.

An Exhibition by the Bundeskunsthalle and the Deutsches Museum
In Cooperation with the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Deutscher Wetterdienst
Curators: Stephan Andreae, Ralph Burmester, Andrea Niehaus

Federal Prize for Art Students

23rd Federal Competition of the Federal Ministry of Education and Research
10 November 2017 to 28 January 2018

The federal competition Art Students Display Their Works has been renamed and is now called Federal Prize for Art Students. The new name reflects a new conceptual approach. The exhibition will showcase only the work of the prize winners. This closer focus allows for a better presentation of the awardees and their work. Each of the twenty-four art academies in Germany nominates two of their most promising students for a chance to win the much coveted prizes. An independent jury selects five to eight winners, who will receive a grant to support their work and a catalogue.
The Federal Prize for Art Students is sponsored by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research and organised by the German National Association for Student Affairs. It’s aim is the support and promotion of young artists.
The design of the poster and the catalogue accompanying the 23^rd competition lies in the hands of the Hochschule der Bildenden Künste Saar.

Ferdinand Hodler
Early Modern Artist

8 September 2017 to 28 January 2018

Ferdinand Hodler (1853–1918) is one of the most important and most successful artists of the early twentieth century. Celebrated alongside Edvard Munch and Gustav Klimt as a key representative of Symbolism and Art Nouveau, he developed a distinctive style of his own. Hodler’s predilection for ornament, his formal repetitions, strong contour lines and idiosyncratic palette were hailed as novel and original by contemporary critics, and his impressive monumental works with their emphasis on large areas of flat colour and clear outlines met with great interest, particularly in Germany.
With more than hundred paintings and numerous drawings, the exhibition is the first comprehensive retrospective of the artist to be shown in Germany in almost twenty years. It sheds light on Hodler’s career – training, travels abroad, participation in competitions, scandals and exhibitions – and presents works from the genres of landscape, portrait, figure and history painting.

Juergen Teller
Enjoy Your Life!

20 April to 3 July 2017 (at Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin)

Juergen Teller is one of the world’s most sought-after contemporary photographers. His pictures have straddled the interface of art and commercial photography. His stylistic device of choice is the portrait. Working in the areas of music, fashion and celebrities as well as everyday scenes and landscape, he draws on his intuitive feel for people, situations, milieus and clichés to create images of great immediacy and deceptive simplicity.
In the exhibition, works like Siegerflieger and My Man Crush, Pep Guardiola transform the Foyer into a public viewing area, where images of victories and defeats bear witness to Teller’s feel for capturing decisive moments. Other groups of works are more autobiographical and occasionally anecdotal: quiet landscapes from Nürnberg, carefully staged yet unsparingly candid images of himself in The Clinic and subjective documentations of his engagement with his youth and his origins such as Irene im Wald. The latest series, Mit dem Teller nach Bonn and Plates/Teller, seem to bring together and concentrate all his earlier themes and compositions. 

The Persian Garden
The Invention of Paradise

13 April to 15 October 2017 in Bonn

Opening with the exhibition Iran. Ancient Cultures between Water and Desert, a Persian garden on the piazza in front of the museum beckons visitors to linger and enjoy its pleasures.
Several gardens in Iran have been designated as UNESCO World Heritage sites. Rather than replicate a specific garden, our garden demonstrates that the art of garden design, developed in Persia in antiquity, continues to shape our idea of an ideal garden – in the East as much as in the West.
Light and shade, heat and cool freshness, the soothing burbling of water, the heady scent of flowers – a garden is a manmade paradise. And indeed, the very word ‘paradise’ has come down to us from ancient Persia. Do come in and enjoy the paradisiac atmosphere of the Persian Garden, an oasis for the mind and the senses!

Aleksandra Domanovic
Kalbträgerin (Calf-Bearer)

2 June to 24 September 2017

In her work, Aleksandra Domanović (b. 1981 in Novi Sad, Yugoslavia) takes a probing look at a wide range of phenomena of contemporary society, among them cultural techniques, scientific and technological developments, history and culture, popular culture and the shaping of national and cultural identity. Her work often has its starting point in the examination of the past and present of her home country, the breakup of Yugoslavia after the end of the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the struggle for a new national and cultural identity. Many of her works are thus informed by her own biography, but they also set a universal example of the artistic examination of national and cultural identity, individuality, collective visual memory and commemorative culture. Domanović’s refined, subtle works are precisely conceived narratives, visualised through the use of iconic images or illustrations taken from other contexts.
For Calf-Bearer, her exhibition in Bonn, the artist expands on one of her themes – Bulls Without Horns – and looks at current scientific research and development, namely bioengineering and the breeding of certain traits in cattle, like the lack of horns. She translates these ideas into sculptures, which she produces by means of computer modelling, 3D printing and casting in synthetic plaster.

Comics! Mangas! Graphic Novels!

7 May to 10 September 2017

With more than 300 exhibits from the United States, Europe and Japan, Comics! Mangas! Graphic Novels! is the most comprehensive exhibition about the genre to be held in Germany.
The comic was the first visual mass medium in history. By the end of the nineteenth century, the major American daily newspapers brought it to millions of readers – day in, day out, and in colour on Sundays. Series like Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland or George Herriman’s Krazy Kat bear witness to the abiding cultural significance of the medium. With the rise of the comic book and the superheroes in the early 1930, the first media-related youth culture developed around the comic – long before the advent of rock ‘n’ roll. In the 1960s, thanks to artists like Robert Crumb or Will Eisner and figures like Asterix or Barbarella, the comic once again began to attract an older readership. In the wake of the cultural upheaval of 1968, the comic came to be seen as the ‘ninth art’, and with the phenomenon of the graphic novel, we now witness the discovery of its hitherto ignored literary potential. At the same time, manga has established itself as a global phenomenon.

Iran
Ancient Cultures
between Water and Desert

13 April to 20 August 2017

The exhibition draws the veil from the long hidden treasures of the early Iranian civilisations that flourished between the seventh millennium BC and the rise of the Achaemenids in the first millennium BC.
From the snow-capped peaks of the Alborz and Zagros mountain ranges to the blazing heat of the Loot Desert, Iran is a country of contrasts. But those forbidding deserts and mountain ranges shelter fertile valleys that have been inhabited by people ever since sedentism. These valleys were the cradle of the Iranian civilisations, which culminated in the rise of the Achaemenid Empire. The mountains provided shelter and raw materials. The wild animals and mythical creatures that populated the wilderness found visual representation in scenes of animals fighting on stone vessels from the gravesites of Jiroft, on imaginatively painted ceramics from Susa and in the battle scenes on the gold bowl from Hasanlu.
The exhibition opens a window onto a country that has been inaccessible for decades and whose imagery is little known in Europe. The treasures from the graves of two Elamite princesses and the spectacular finds from the burial grounds of Jiroft are shown outside Iran for the first time.

Katharina Sieverding
Art and capital
from 1967 to 2017

11 March to 16 July 2017

Internationally renowned as a pioneer of unconventional visual strategies and her innovative media-led practice, Katharina Sieverding has revitalised the artistic potential of photography. She introduced the super-sized format as a key element of her exhibitions at a time when this was far from common.
Since the 1960s, using film and photography, Sieverding has employed her portrait with unparalleled consistency, often blowing it up to monumental size and manipulating it in myriad ways. In the 1970s, with astonishing prescience, she began to develop her large-format multilayer montages on the state of the world. Her creative practice not only reproduces the accelerated visual processes of the present, it also scrutinises them in terms of responsibility, not least her own.
The retrospective exhibition presents a survey of Katharina Sieverding’s serial photographic works from 1967 to today complemented by floor-to-ceiling projections that allow the artist to visualise the innovative power of her archive of images.