8 November 2008 – 8 February 2009

A Collector’s Eye on Paul Klee

Courtesy of its second autumn exhibition in 2008, the Zentrum Paul Klee is offering visitors a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to view more than 20 outstanding, privately owned Klees in a concentrated display of the artist’s work. The paintings, owned by a prominent private collector, are supplemented by selected works drawn from the Zentrum Paul Klee’s own extensive collection, which help contextualise the works on loan and allow their quality and significance to shine through.

The private collection was built up a work at a time over three decades. It reflects not only Klee the artist, but also the gradual and steadily deepening interest and understanding of the collector himself, and as such is an unashamedly individual vision of Klee’s oeuvre. The collector’s intensely personal perspective represents the focus of the exhibition at the Zentrum Paul Klee. To inject a sense of drama into the proceedings, the works will hang side-by-side like pearls in a necklace, allowing them to release their creative energy through reciprocity. Each picture is accompanied by a small number of precisely selected drawings, diagrams, watercolours and manuscripts by Klee that serve to emphasise both the variety of motifs and techniques that appear in the works of the private collection, and the various periods from which the works stem.

The exhibition furthermore explores the relationships that a collector and curator of a self-owned “virtual gallery” enters into, and the emphases that he sets, painstakingly pursues and secures by means of the concertedly focused presence of the works in all their complexity. The result is, for the duration of the exhibition, a museum within a museum at the Zentrum Paul Klee – one that expresses the personal preferences and quality consciousness of a collector and, in a very real sense, illustrates the diversity and meaningfulness of the role of collectors in the history of the avant-garde to the present day.

Address

Zentrum Paul Klee
Monument im Fruchtland 3
3006 Bern
phone +41 31 359 01 01
http://www.zpk.org

Opening Hours

Tuesday-Sunday 10 a.m. - 5 p.m.,
closed on Monday

Description of the Museum

The collection presentation is given over exclusively to the works of Paul Klee, with the aim of highlighting the different mood layers in his oeuvre.

Of the 10,000 or so works that make up Paul Klee’s oeuvre a good 40 per cent, that is to say around 4,000 paintings, watercolours and drawings as well as archives and biographical material, has been brought together at the Zentrum Paul Klee. The Centre’s collections are considered as the largest collection of a single artist of world renown.

opened in 2005; architect: Renzo Piano

Within 10 days
starting exhibitions
ending exhibitions