In 2022, the Fondation Beyeler’s exhibition programme takes place under the banner of its 25th anniversary. It launches with a major retrospective on Georgia O’Keeffe, followed by the summer exhibition «Mondrian». In autumn, the Fondation Beyeler will stage one of its most comprehensive collection exhibitions to date as well as the exhibition project Palimpsest by Colombian artist Doris Salcedo. Popular formats such as «sun.set» and «Sound Garden» will be continued in 2022, complemented by a special anniversary events program.

Georgia O’Keeffe
23 January – 22 May 2022
With a large retrospective on Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986), the Fondation Beyeler presents one of the most significant painters of the 20th century and a prominent figure of modern American art. “One rarely takes the time to really see a flower. I have painted it big enough so that others would see what I see.” This early quote from 1926 became a guiding thread for O’Keeffe’s art and life. From her earliest abstractions to her iconic depictions of flowers and landscapes from the American Southwest, the exhibition brings together a large selection of paintings from public and private collections, some of them only rarely displayed. The exhibition is organized by the Fondation Beyeler, Riehen / Basel, the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, and the Centre Pompidou, Paris, in partnership with the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe.

The exhibition highlights Georgia O’Keeffe’s distinctive way of contemplating her environment and translating it into novel, unprecedented images of reality.

Passages – Landscape, Figure and Abstraction
12 February – 14 August 2022
The interplay between figuration and abstraction is a fascinating subject in modern art. The new presentation of the collection illustrates this by juxtaposing important paintings and sculptures from impressionism, classical modernism, and contemporary art. A walk through the history of art, the display includes many “passages” between landscapes and figures, which illustrate how figurative and abstract elements combine or collide.

Sondra Perry: Lineage for a Phantom Zone
13 February – 13 March 2022
Fondation Beyeler presents Lineage for a Phantom Zone, an immersive audio-visual installation by the American artist Sondra Perry. The work imagines a dream about the artist’s grandmother that Perry wishes she could have had, thereby exploring her personal history as the roots of dreams, her view of the erasure of Black history in the American South, and the dream space as a passage for reaching sites of heritage that are absent in reality. The multisensory installation will be accessible on the museum’s lower floor and accompanied by an artist’s book.

Mondrian
5 June – 9 October 2022
Marking the 150th anniversary of the artist’s birth, the Fondation Beyeler will devote an exhibition to the Dutch painter Piet Mondrian. As one of the most important artists of the avant-garde movement, Mondrian shaped the evolution of painting from figuration to abstraction. His early work was influenced not only by late 19th century Dutch landscape painting but also by Symbolism and Cubism. It was only in the early 1920s that he began concentrating on a wholly non-representational pictorial vocabulary consisting solely of rectilinear arrangements of black lines on a white background and the three primary colours blue, red and yellow. While the collection of the Fondation Beyeler focuses primarily on works from the later phases of Mondrian’s career, the exhibition will look at his development as an artist up to the 1920s and the stylistic genesis of his later work. Separate sections will deal with motifs such as windmills, dunes and seascapes, the farmstead reflected in water and plants in various states of abstraction. “Mondrian” is organised jointly by the Fondation Beyeler and K20, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf.

The Great Collection Show
October 2022 to January 2023
Fondation Beyeler celebrates its 25th anniversary by staging the largest-ever presentation of its collection to date. The renowned Beyeler Collection includes nearly 400 works by leading artists from 1800 to the present day, including Claude Monet, Paul Cézanne, Vincent van Gogh, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Wassily Kandinsky, Alexander Calder, Joan Miró, Alberto Giacometti, Louise Bourgeois, Mark Rothko, Andy Warhol, Gerhard Richter, Marlene Dumas, Roni Horn and Wolfgang Tillmans. The panoramic exhibition of more than 150 works spanning media from painting, sculpture, and drawing to photography and film showcases the Beyeler Collection in a new, enriching way.

Doris Salcedo: Palimpsest
October 2022 – January 2023
In parallel to its collection display, the Fondation Beyeler will present Palimpsest, an exhibition project by Colombian artist Doris Salcedo poetically charting the dramatic global migration crisis.

Regularly updated information on the anniversary year program is available here.

Fondation Beyeler opening hours: 10am to 6pm daily, Wednesday 10am to 8pm