The practice of the young Swiss artist Raphael Hefti (b. 1978) has its point of departure in the investigation of the unrecognized potential of materials and industrial processes. The alteration of a sheet of metal or a pane of glass marks its point of arrival. Hefti thereby intervenes not only in technical processes but also within industrial manufacturing plants, which become the laboratory for his research. In addition to The Violet Blue Green Yellow Orange House (2014), his permanent installation crowning the Fondation’s glazed extension, Hefti is exhibiting the results of other artistic experiments, including a forest of steel, copper, titanium and aluminium poles and a photogram in an extremely large format.

The “high yellow note” that Vincent van Gogh and so many artists have sought explores the limits of expressiveness and attempts to go beyond them, formally and emotionally.
A thematic exhibition featuring the work of 22 artists from different generations and backgrounds (artist biographies below): Richard Artschwager, Paul Blanchet aka le Sauvage, Louise Bourgeois, Vittorio Brodmann, Claude Cahun, Nina Childress, Martin Disler, Valie Export, Markus Gadient, Bruno Jakob, Asger Jorn, Martha Jungwirth, Karen Kilimnik, Verena Loewensberg, Albert Oehlen, Thomias Radin, Pipilotti Rist, Klaudia Schifferle, Pierre Schwerzmann, Hyun-Sook Song, Vincent van Gogh, Dominique White

Curators: Bice Curiger and Margaux Bonopera

This exhibition catalogue contains colour reproductions of all the works exhibited as well as new essays.

The exhibition “Human Nature – Human Nature” asks the question of whose future it is and how we are shaping it today. The power of art is such that it succeeds in conveying poetry and hope in an age full of questions about the future of both nature and mankind.

Erling Kagge is a Norwegian explorer born in 1963 in Oslo. Famous for having successfully completed the Three Poles Challenge, reaching the South Pole, the North Pole and the summit of Mount Everest, he is also a lawyer, writer, publisher and collector. He has entrusted Bice Curiger, artistic director of the Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles, with the task of curating an exhibition of his collection, the main strands of which reflect Kagge’s enduring sense of wonder and curiosity in the face of the world.

The Erling Kagge Collection today encompasses more than 800 works by artists of different nationalities and generations – all of them pieces that have helped Kagge, in his own words, “to grow”. The collection draws its coherence from its very diversity: there is nothing coincidental, therefore, in the fact that it contains objects playing upon visual perception, such as those by Olafur Eliasson, at the same time as critical works such as those by Klara Lidén, which evoke the notion of (topographical and conceptual) “underground”.

The exhibition My Cartography: The Erling Kagge Collection was previously shown at the Santander Art Gallery (Fundación Banco Santander, Madrid) and includes work by Diane Arbus, Tauba Auerbach, Trisha Donnelly, Raymond Pettibon, Wolfgang Tillmans and Franz West.

Laura Owens transformed the Fondation’s ground floor, designing a monumental, handmade wallpaper, creating a suspended universe between the premodern and the contemporary. While this space can evoke the patterned interiors that Van Gogh knew from his time in Arles, they also summon the world of scanners, Photoshop and digital printing. The wallpaper motifs are borrowed from the work of the English artist and designer Winifred How, who studied in London in the early twentieth century.

With every work she makes, Laura Owens asks new questions about painting today, about its relationship to materials, processes and traditions that have been seen to lie outside it. The complex wallpaper installation she created in Arles is also an environmental painting. Its realization required the use of many techniques, as well as the addition of hand-painted elements. Conceived to last only for the duration of the exhibition, however, this work will remain ephemeral. Through this book you can live, or relive, the immersive experience that transformed the Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles during the year 2021.

It extends and completes the exhibition by bringing together an interview conducted throughout the exhibition between the curators Bice Curiger, Julia Marchand and Margaux Bonopera, a text by the young author Théo Casciani as well as a glossary of the artists, movements and cultural references at the heart of the exhibition.

Taking its title from a letter from Vincent van Gogh addressed to the painter Emile Bernard from Arles, the thematic exhibition “Breathing one’s breath” brings together 26 artists from different generations and artistic movements, including Marina Abramovic & Ulay, Vivian Suter, Giuseppe Penone, Vivian Springford, Joyce Pensato and Hans Hartung.

In close exchange with Nicole Eisenman (*1965 in Verdun/F, lives in New York/USA), an unusual and unique project was conceived in which Eisenman’s œuvre enters into a dialogue with works from the modern era. The latter come from the collections of the participating institutions.

In addition to numerous illustrations of Eisenman’s works and historical positions, the publication contains an introduction to the exhibition project, a roundtable discussion on the exhibition concept with Bice Curiger, Daniel Koep, Kolja Reichert and Beate Söntgen, and an essay by Christina Végh on Nicole Eisenman’s work. In the form of a glossary, various terms are discussed in relation to Eisenman’s work, but also in a more general art historical context. Finally, the contributions on the respective collection holdings and the short comments on individual modernist artists serve to contextualize the selected historical works from the participating museums.