The siege of speech, pain, lust, passion, eating and spitting, the mouth is currently receiving the greatest attention worldwide as the scene of the highly infectious Covid-19 disaster. In the past few months, it has moved to the center of social, political and media debates.
On Everyone’s Lips. From Pieter Bruegel to Cindy Sherman presents more than 150 exhibits from Antiquity to the present. A specially conceived architecture representing an abstracted oral cavity serves as a backdrop for an impressive range of works relating to the oral. Among them are paintings, drawings, sculptures, installations, photographs and videos by Albrecht Dürer, Pablo Picasso, Louise Bourgeois, Andy Warhol, Marina Abramovic and Cindy Sherman.
The exhibition takes us from a 2,600-year-old ancient Egyptian bronze figure depicting the nursing goddess Isis with her son Harpocrates to contemporary works such as the Scream by Christian Marclay via a character head by Franz Xaver Messerschmidt. Also on display is a site-specific installation by Benjamin Houlihan, for which the German artist applied tempera paint to a wall with his tongue.
