Medardo Rosso: Inventing Modern Sculpture

Sculptor, photographer, and master of artistic staging, rival to Auguste Rodin and a role model for numerous artists: around 1900, Medardo Rosso (1858 in Turin, Italy–1928 in Milan, Italy) revolutionized sculpture. Although exceptionally influential, the Italian-French artist remains too little known today. Medardo Rosso: Inventing Modern Sculpture aims to change this. Featuring around fifty of his sculptures and two hundred and fifty photographs and drawings, the exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Basel offers a rare opportunity to discover Rosso’s oeuvre in a comprehensive retrospective. It invites the audience to learn more about his pioneering activities in turn-of-the-century Milan and Paris as well as the significance of his art in a contemporary perspective, while at the same time providing the basis for a new investigation of the history of modern sculpture.

The exhibition, which was produced in cooperation with the mumok (Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien) and co-curated by Heike Eipeldauer and Elena Filipovic, helps visitors understand Rosso’s radical explorations of form (and its undoing), material, and technique across media. The extraordinary and lasting impact of his œuvre is revealed by encounters with works by over sixty artists from the past one hundred years including Lynda Benglis, Constantin Brâncuși, Edgar Degas, David Hammons, Eva Hesse, Meret Oppenheim, Auguste Rodin, and Alina Szapocznikow.

“Nothing is material in space.”

Medardo Rosso

Medardo Rosso in his studio on the Boulevard des Batignolles, 1890, print from the original glass negative, 13 × 17.7 cm, © Archivio Medardo Rosso

Twenty years after the first and only previous retrospective in Switzerland, the comprehensive exhibition Medardo Rosso: Inventing Modern Sculpture puts special emphasis on reconstructing Rosso’s experimental and intermedia approach. It gathers around fifty bronze, plaster, and wax sculptures by the artist, including key pieces, and hundreds of photographs and drawings. Many of these works have rarely been on view outside Italy in the past several decades.

In keeping with the principle of comparative vision espoused by the artist himself, the exhibition presents his works in “conversation” with more than sixty historic and contemporary photographs, paintings, sculptures, and videos. In encounters across the generations, Rosso thus meets artists from his own time to the present including Francis Bacon, Phyllida Barlow, Louise Bourgeois, Isa Genzken, Alberto Giacometti, Robert Gober, David Hammons, Hans Josephsohn, Yayoi Kusama, Marisa Merz, Bruce Nauman, Senga Nengudi, Richard Serra, Georges Seurat, Paul Thek, Rosemarie Trockel, Hannah Villiger, Andy Warhol, and Francesca Woodman (see the complete list in the appendix). The Basel version of the exhibition expands on the one in Vienna by adding works by Umberto Boccioni, Miriam Cahn, Mary Cassatt, Giorgio de Chirico, Marcel Duchamp, Peter Fischli / David Weiss, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Sidsel Meineche Hansen, Henry Moore, Meret Oppenheim, Simone Fattal, Giuseppe Penone, Odilon Redon, Pamela Rosenkranz, Kaari Upson, Andra Ursuţa, and Danh Vō.

Robert Gober, Untitled, 1998–1999, Emanuel Hoffmann-Stiftung, gift of the artist 1999, on deposit in the Öffentliche Kunstsammlung Basel ©Robert Gober, Photo: Kunstmuseum Basel, Martin P. Bühler

The exhibition begins in the Kunstmuseum Basel Hauptbau’s courtyard, where Rodin’s Burghers of Calais (1884–1889) come face to face with a work by Pamela Rosenkranz. From the Hauptbau, the visitors proceed through the underground concourse and past an expansive work by Kaari Upson to the Neubau, where a monographic presentation of Rosso’s art is on view on the ground floor. The exhibition continues on the second floor with the juxtapositions with works by other artists.