27 October 2024 - 21 April 2025
The exhibition The Best, The Rest, and The Unexpected Guests, curated by artist Lorenza Longhi, brings together selected works from the Bechtler family collections with works by contemporary Swiss artists. The focus is Longhi's subjective view of the collections, revealing surprising connections within the diverse selection of works.
The retrospective of the Bechtler family's collecting activities includes key works from the 1960s to the present day. By juxtaposing them with contemporary works, Longhi creates a lively dialogue that goes beyond mere juxtaposition. Longhi invites visitors to enter the Bechtler Foundation's exhibition space as guests. Through the deliberate selection and arrangement of the works, Longhi takes the everyday into the absurd, blurring the boundaries between art and everyday life.
A lamp that bathes the room in warm light seems to do more than just illuminate it: it becomes part of a larger narrative that reflects the tension between artwork and everyday object in the context of collecting. A bench, a shoe rack, or an abstract painting on the wall – all these objects point to the idea of the interior as permeated by art, as a "domestication of art" that, here in the exhibition space, connects the public with the private and vice versa. Through domestication, wild animals become pets, and the collected art becomes part of the domestic living space. Katharina Fritsch's poodle, which is used to promote the exhibition and is intended to welcome visitors with joyful anticipation, symbolizes this.
Through their materiality, chosen motifs, and presentation, the works evoke memories. Like leafing through a scrapbook, a dialogue emerges between past and present, between what we preserve and what we forget. But what stories do the objects tell? What remains, what is forgotten?
Artists in the exhibition:
Mitchell Anderson, Kathryn Andrews, Janine Antoni, Ruedi Bechtler, Anthony Caro, Walter De Maria, Ida Ekblad, Cédric Eisenring, Fischli / Weiss, Sylvie Fleury, Katharina Fritsch, Anya Gallaccio, Liam Gillick, Jasmine Gregory, Bernhard Hegglin, Louise Lawler, Miriam Laura Leonardi, Mario Merz, Sveta Mordovskaya, Sarah Morris, Kaspar Müller, Pamela Rosenkranz, Josh Smith, Simon Starling, Christopher Wool, Urban Zellweger
