Although sometimes underacknowledged, the hybrid art of the relief, in-between painting and sculpture, is one of humankind’s oldest pictorial mediums. In Antiquity, the relief was primarily an architectural decoration and during the Renaissance, it played an important role in the competition between painters and sculptors over which medium could best imitate reality. For artists of the Modern era, is it painting, sculpture, surface or space?
This major exhibition gathers a selection of 140 key works by nearly 100 leading artists such as Bertel Thorvaldsen, Jules Dalou, Auguste Rodin, Medardo Rosso, Paul Gauguin, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Alexander Archipenko, Jean Arp, Kurt Schwitters, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Yves Klein, Louise Nevelson and Lee Bontecou among others. It highlights the renewed artistic interest in the relief as a laboratory for experimenting with new forms, materials and techniques over 160 years, from 1800 to the 1960s.
Whether glued or nailed, made with natural sponges or a soup ladle, the relief’s societal significance grew alongside the cataclysmic changes of the 20th century to become a place for utopias and a point of departure for a new world.
