3 March - 2 June 2013
RODNEY GRAHAM
Vexation Island

The Canadian concept artist Rodney Graham (b. 1949) works in a wide range of media such as sculpture, painting, photography, film, installation and music. Graham‘s work is rife with allusions and references to greats of literature, philosophy, the visual arts and pop culture whose myths and works he subjects to ironic, yet sympathising appropriation and re-consideration. The repetition of ideas, compositions and imagery is an aesthetic principle of central importance to Graham’s work.

Rodney Graham gained international recognition for his costume drama Vexation Island, which he conceived in 1997 for the Canadian pavilion at the Venice Biennale. In this film, the artist himself plays a pirate who is stranded on a tropical island à la Robinson Crusoe.  Vexation Island is a piece of slapstick comedy, showing in a continuous loop the neurotic repetitive actions of the hero. The pirate awakens on the tropic island only to be promptly knocked out again by a falling coconut after having successfully shaken it out of a palm tree. Regaining consciousness after a while, he compulsively returns to the palm tree and events run their familiar course. There is no escape from Vexation Island.

3 Mar - 2 Jun 2013
ULRICH MACK
Island Peolpe

The German photographer Ulrich Mack (b. 1934) is an internationally renowned photo journalist who contributed to the German magazines Quick, twen and Stern in the 1960s and 1970s. Ulrich Mack’s works have been exhibited in numerous museums and are included in national and international collections. Essential subjects of his photographic oeuvre are people and landscapes. Mack made a name for himself with, among others, various photo series of the industrial landscapes of the Ruhr district, Northern German landscapes, numerous artist portraits, as well as a unique comparative series of photographs of islanders on the German North Sea island of Pellworm and on Harkers Island off the east coast of the United States.

Inspired by August Sander’s major photo series People of the 20^th Century, Ulrich Mack set out in the period from 1978 to 1981 to capture the people of Pellworm as individuals in their living environment in straightforward, unemotional black and white photographs. In 1984-85 he then did another photo series about islanders on Harkers Island off the coast of North Carolina. In 1995, he combined the two island series into a two-volume study titled Inselmenschen/Island People. This comparative ethnographic investigation reveals striking parallels between the ways of life and experiences of island societies on either side of the Atlantic.


3 Mar - 25 Aug 2013
HANDICARFT
Material and Symbolism

The many manifestations of handicraft in art – as a historical subject, a subversive strategy or staged materiality – are the focus of this exhibition. Framed as a pointed dialogue between historical and current artistic practices, the show traces an associative arc from the 19^th century to the present.

Whether we think of fisherwomen knitting in the dunes or of men mending nets at the harbour, handiworks long played an important role in life at the seaside.  With industrialisation, handicraft lost its original function as a livelihood, yet at the same time took hold as a middle-class leisure activity. In the 1970s and 1980s, artists such as Rosemarie Trockel and Alighiero e Boetti rid needlework of its reputation as a wholesome activity for women through subversive and political works. And handicraft is experiencing an on-going renaissance in the art of today as well. Central to this revival is the transgression of social und art historical conventions. Abstract or representational, art or craft, female or male – not exclusively textile-based, the practices presented in this exhibition subvert those categories and reveal new relationships.

Artists: Alighiero e Boetti, David Artz, Birgit Dieker, Otto Heinrich Engel, Julius Exner, Jochen Flinzer, Edgar Honetschläger, Viggo Johansen, Isa Melsheimer, Abigail O’Brien and Mary A. Kelly, Wilhelm Peters, Judith Samen, Yinka Shonibare, Laura Splan, Annette Streyl, Rosemarie Trockel.


3 Mar 2013 - 12 Jan 2014
CHANGES OF SCENERY III
Models and Stories

Each year, five exhibition booths in the garden hall of the Museum Kunst der Westküste serve to present various contemporary artistic practices. This year’s Changes of Scenery raise the curtain on what amounts to models of theatre stages: on view are marine creatures lost in the ecstasy of underwater love, fragile snow globes with morbid fairy-tale imagery, a floating coffin on the high seas, as well as word pictures with local colour and shrimp appearing in the role of human beings. The blending of man and animal in role play and the sensual tinkering with scenery and playful manipulating of puppets, objects, scenes and concepts point to a way of appropriating the world through models of sorts.

What models have in common is that they are representations of things. Models can also be things that stand in for people. As a model, man with his performances is wholly at the service of things. In architecture and art, the model appears as a design having an indexical relation to the real. Used as as an alternative draft to reality, it can take on idiosyncratic, subversive or utopian qualities and tell a completely different story.

Artists: Walter Martin & Paloma Muñoz (USA), Rupprecht Matthies (Germany), Hotel Modern (Netherlands), Isabella Rossellini (Italy/USA).


9 Jun 2013 - 12 Jan 2014
EDVARD MUNCH
Alpha and Omega

The Norwegian painter and graphic artist Edvard Munch (1863-1944) was one of the founding figures of modern art. Reflecting on existential states of mind in his work, he developed a symbolic expressive manner of visualizing the abysses of the modern soul. In the early years of the 20^th century, the sensitive artist struggled with the fallout of a failed romantic relationship, living through depressing years of crisis that culminated in a nervous breakdown in 1908.

During his eight-month stay at the sanatorium of Dr Daniel Jacobsen in Copenhagen, Munch converted his room into a studio and developed a new, extroverted and more expressive style. This period saw the creation of his chef d’oeuvre, Alpha and Omega, a series of 22 lithographs and a printed prose poem. Together, these add up to a pictorial parable relating, in several episodes, the story of Alpha and Omega, the first human beings on an island. In this island fantasy, Munch’s intense obsession with the battle of the sexes takes on grotesque dimensions, escalating into what can be described as an ironic reckoning with the libertarian sexual morals of Christiana’s bohemian society. Personal adversaries are caricatured as hybrid creatures and in the end Alpha kills Omega and is himself eaten by zoomorphic humans. Continuing the tradition of William Hogarth and Francisco Goya, Munch’s human bestiary appears as a caricature of society.

The exhibition is curated by the Austrian Munch expert Dieter Buchhart in cooperation with the Museum Kunst der Westküste.

9 Jun 2013 - 12 Jan 2014
MATHIAS BRASCHLER
AND MONIKA FISCHER
Victims of Climate Change

In 2009, the Swiss photographers Mathias Braschler (b. 1969) and Monika Fischer (b. 1971) visited 16 countries around the globe and interviewed people whose existence is threatened by climate change. The result is a unique artistic document about the impact of global warming. With their large-format camera the photographers captured over fifty stories of fishermen and farmers, hunters and shepherds, mountain guides and victims of wild fires or floods. Standing on parched earth or among ruins, in front of melted glaciers or in the midst of flooded landscapes and in spite of acute existential distress, the victims appear confident. The low camera angle and frontal view leave the sitters’ dignity intact, becoming an instrument of sympathetic observation.

Mathias Braschler and Monika Fischer started their collaboration in 2003 and today live and work in Zurich and New York. They have received multiple awards for their photo projects, among them a World Press Photo Award.


1 Sep 2013 - 12 Jan 2014
HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN
Impromptu
Photographs, silhouettes, drawings

Hans Christian Andersen Christian Andersen (1805-75) is famous primarily for the fairy tales he wrote. And yet he left behind numerous drawings and as much as one thousand silhouettes. This exhibition presents for the first time photographic portraits of Hans Christian Andersen together with a selection of his silhouettes and drawings. A favourite of the European royal courts, Andersen was one of the most photographed figures of his time and a majority of the altogether 250 photographic portraits were taken at his own initiative. What all three forms of expression have in common is the immediacy and suddenness of the captured moment. The drawings convey episodic impressions of the artist’s travels, while the paper cut-outs are products of the poet’s imagination. The photographic portraits, in turn, show an aloof, yet sensitive, unstable and nervous artist – a self-image that Hans Christian Andersen staged over and over again and restlessly spread throughout the world.

As an important element of the exhibition, the Danish artists Ebbe Stub Wittrup (b. 1973) and Ulrik heltioft (f. 1973) have produced a black and white film about Hans Christian Andersen’s silhouettes that animates the latter to create moving images. The exhibition is curated by the Danish photography historians Tove Thage and the artists in cooperation with the Museum Kunst der Westküste.


RE-PRESENTING THE COLLECTION!
New, familiar and never-before-seen works from the Sammlung Kunst der Westküste
3 Mar 2013 - 12 Jan 2014

The Sammlung Kunst der Westküste includes Danish, German, Dutch and Norwegian art from 1830 to 1930. Currently comprising some 500 works, the collection offers a multi-faceted look at coastal living environments and conveys a fascination with the sea in an impressive panorama of subjects ranging from Bergen in the Netherlands to Bergen in southern Norway. Anna Ancher, Michael Ancher, Max Beckmann, Johan Christian Dahl, Peder Severin Krøyer, Christian Krohg, Max Liebermann, Emil Nolde and Edvard Munch are among the major 19^th and 20^th century Scandinavian and German artists included in the collection, while Dutch painting is prominently represented by the romanticist Andreas Schelfhout and leading exponents of the Hague School such as Jozef Israels and Hendrik Willem Mesdag. Also among the holdings are works by Johan Barthold Jongkind and Eugène Boudin, who are regarded as precursors of impressionism and were of central importance to the development of European landscape painting in the 19^th century. Early works by Piet Mondrian point to the impressionist beginnings of this artist who ranks among the pioneers of abstract painting in the 20^th century. Finally, a main focus of the collection is North Frisian painting, which is represented by two of its premier practitioners, Otto Heinrich Engel and Hans Peter Feddersen.

The exhibition of parts of these extensive holdings calls for a very careful selection of works in order to adequately reflect both the art historical canon and the country-specific aspects of the four-nation collection. Any presentation of the collection has to ask itself to what extent it is representative. The current presentation aims to highlight the stylistic transition from romanticism to expressionism. Rather than attempting to offer a harmonious overall picture, it relies on the diversity of subjects and genres. To this end, new acquisitions of the past four years are assembled and at the same time works are shown that have never before seen the light of the museum’s galleries. In addition, familiar and pivotal artistic approaches within the collection are exemplified by works that are part and parcel of any presentation.

FIONA TAN
Brendan's Isle
27 Feb 2011 - 12 Jan 2014

The sound piece Brendan’s Isle (2010) by Dutch artist Fiona Tan (born 1966) was created during the stay of the internationally renowned artist on the Island of Föhr in the summer of 2010. It references a medieval Dutch poem about the adventures of the Irish monk Brendan (483-577). According to legend, the “Irish Odysseus” Brendan spent seven years sailing the Atlantic Ocean in search of the “Isle of the Blessed.” Its subject is the dream, persisting to this day, of Utopian bliss in a nowhere world that is surrounded by nothing but water and removed from time and place.