Kunsthaus Zürich is currently showing a major retrospective of one of Switzerland’s most prominent artist, Roman Signer. Roman Signer is known for his inventive and dynamic approach to art, where he transforms ordinary objects into “event sculptures” that explore time, space, and energy through unexpected, often playful interactions with natural forces.

“Unexpected encounters, playful experiments, and the forces of nature Roman Signer’s art reveals a world full of energy and transformation. The large exhibition gallery at the Kunsthaus Zürich will become an open landscape where time, movement, and material come together in surprising ways. Roman Signer is a master of transformation.

For over five decades, he has explored the possibilities of time, space, and energy using the simplest of materials. Everyday objects such as buckets, bottles, or kayaks become carriers of surprising, poetic events in his art. With curiosity and a sense of experimentation, Signer challenges the order of the world and invites us to rediscover its beauty and power from new perspectives.

Inspired by life itself, Signer has never been a studio artist. His works often emerge in the open air or urban spaces. During a study stay in Warsaw in the 1970s, the streets became his “academy.” This playful and open approach has shaped his artistic practice ever since.

The exhibition at the Kunsthaus Zürich offers a chance to experience Signer’s work in an open and dynamic setting. Without walls or boundaries, the artist arranges his works so that visitors can explore them as if taking a walk. At the heart of the exhibition are new works created specifically for the show, alongside significant pieces from various stages of his career.

An iconic element in Signer’s oeuvre is the kayak – sometimes suspended, sometimes dismantled, or on a bumpy ride through the landscape. His works surprise, inspire wonder, and encourage us to rediscover the world with a sense of playfulness.

In addition to the sculptures, the exhibition features films and photographs that highlight the temporal and performative aspects of Signer’s art. This creates a compelling dialogue between permanence and transience, between the forces of nature and humanity’s attempts to harness them.” (from the exhibition text)

Roman Signer’s retrospective exhibition at Kunsthaus Zürich is on view until August 17, 2025.

Roman Signer: Landscape. Retrospective at Kunsthaus Zürich. Press preview, Zürich (Switzerland), April 3, 2025.

Charles Ross: Spectrum 14 at the Getty Center in Los Angeles is an exhibition in the PST ART: Art & Science Collide series. Spectrum 14 is a calibrated array of prisms that cast a dazzling display of luminous color across the Museum’s rotunda. Bands of spectral light traverse the space in relation to the sun, which follow a slightly different arc through the sky every day. Over time, Ross’s work changes in response to Earth’s rotational orbit, connecting us to the premodern experience of astronomical observation and calculation that defined cycles of days, seasons, and rituals. This project was commissioned for PST ART as part of the exhibition Lumen: The Art and Science of Light. This is the second “Rotunda Commission,” a series of art installations inspired by the Getty Museum’s collection, architecture, and site. The exhibition runs until September 13, 2026.

Charles Ross: Spectrum 14 / Getty Center, Los Angeles. October 13, 2024.

Charles Ross is an American contemporary artist born in 1937 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He is renowned for his innovative work that explores natural light, time, and planetary motion, blending art with scientific concepts. His practice spans multiple mediums, including large-scale prism and solar spectrum installations, “solar burns” created by focusing sunlight through lenses, dynamic paintings made with dynamite and powdered pigment, and his monumental earthwork, Star Axis, a naked-eye observatory in New Mexico that he has been constructing since conceiving it in 1971.

Ross emerged in the mid-1960s during the rise of minimalism and is considered a pioneer of “prism art”—a niche within that movement—as well as a key figure in the land art movement. His work often incorporates geometry, seriality, and refined forms to reveal optical, astronomical, and perceptual phenomena, reflecting his background in mathematics (he earned a BA from UC Berkeley in 1960) and sculpture (MA from UC Berkeley in 1962). Notable projects include the Dwan Light Sanctuary (1996), a collaboration with Virginia Dwan featuring prisms that project moving solar spectra, and Sunlight Convergence/Solar Burn: The Equinoctial Year (1971–1972), a series of 366 solar-burned planks documenting a year of sunlight.

His career began in New York, where he was part of the influential artist cooperative at 80 Wooster Street, contributing to the development of SoHo as an art hub. Ross has exhibited at prestigious venues like the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum, and his works are held in collections such as the Centre Georges Pompidou and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. In 2011, he was named a Guggenheim Fellow. Today, he splits his time between SoHo, Manhattan, and New Mexico, where he continues to work on Star Axis, nearing completion after over five decades.

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Medardo Rosso (1858–1928), an Italian-French sculptor and photographer, influenced art around 1900. His work impacted sculpture history, though he remains less recognized today. The exhibition Medardo Rosso: Inventing Modern Sculpture at Kunstmuseum Basel features about fifty sculptures and two hundred fifty photographs and drawings. It explores his contributions in Milan and Paris and his role in modern sculpture’s development. Produced with mumok in Vienna and co-curated by Heike Eipeldauer and Elena Filipovic, the exhibition examines Rosso’s experiments with form, material, and technique across media. It includes works by over sixty artists from the past century, such as Lynda Benglis, Constantin Brâncuși, and Auguste Rodin, showing his influence.

This retrospective, the first in Switzerland in twenty years, displays Rosso’s bronze, plaster, and wax sculptures, alongside photographs and drawings, many rarely seen outside Italy. The exhibition pairs his works with pieces by artists like Francis Bacon, Louise Bourgeois, and Yayoi Kusama, spanning generations. The Basel version adds works by Umberto Boccioni, Marcel Duchamp, and others. Starting in the museum’s courtyard with Rodin’s Burghers of Calais and a piece by Pamela Rosenkranz, it continues through the museum, presenting Rosso’s art and its connections to other works.

Medardo Rosso: Inventing Modern Sculpture / Retrospective Exhibition at Kunstmuseum Basel. Basel (Switzerland), March 27, 2025.

Press text (excerpt):

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.

Medardo Rosso and his art: “Medardo Rosso is without a doubt the greatest living sculptor,” Guillaume Apollinaire wrote in L’Europe nouvelle, a magazine published in Paris, after visiting the artist’s studio in 1918. The influential art critic and poet’s words suggest how appreciated Rosso’s work was in its time. Born in Turin in 1858, Rosso moved to Paris in 1889 and spent the next three decades in the art metropolis; he only returned to his native Italy in his final years. Except for a year of studies at the Accademia di Brera (Academy of Fine Arts), Milan, where he attended drawing classes in the Scuola di Anatomia (School of Anatomy), Rosso was self-taught. He also composed a number of inventive and stylistically idiosyncratic essays in art theory. In Paris, he not only socialized with the Impressionists but also met Auguste Rodin (1840–1917), who had already made a name for himself as an artist. The two began working on a radical redefinition of the sculptural medium. To overcome obsolete ideas about representation, production, and perception, Rosso was adamant, a fundamental change was needed that would “breathe life” into sculpture: “There is no painting, there is no sculpture, there is only a thing that lives.” The human scale and the fragmented staging, both of which lend Rosso’s work an air of intimacy, and the agitated and blurred edges of his figures, go against all the aspirations to eternity embodied by the sort of heroic monumental sculpture that was conventional at the time; they were also at odds with longstanding sculptural traditions. On the level of his motifs and materials, Rosso pursued similar aims, eschewing narratives of valor and glory to turn his attention to working class people and create works that sought to capture the fleeting essence of a moment in time.

Rosso’s creative process: To make his figures, Rosso used bronze as well as more modest and less durable materials like wax and plaster, which sculptors before him had typically used only for maquettes or in auxiliary functions. In their suppleness and malleability, they conveyed an ephemeral impression—one reason why his work has also been celebrated as a sculptural version of Impressionism. However, this is a designation that only describes one aspect of Rosso’s groundbreaking work, which is difficult to categorize in many respects. Over time, the artist came to concentrate on a small repertoire of motifs, which he kept returning to in different materials and media, varying them to produce changing effects. Beginning in 1900, when photography was still a nascent medium, Rosso systematically integrated photography into his creative process. He photographed his figures and exhibited the pictures, arranging them in ensembles together with his sculptures as well as works by contemporaries and copies of works of art from past eras. This sort of staging made the space surrounding the works part and parcel of the overall sculptural effect. As Rosso himself wrote: “We are nothing but the consequences of the things that surround us. Even when we move, we are always connected to other objects.” Rosso placed importance on building a rapport with his environment, engaging it in “conversation,” as he put it: he wanted to record the special instant when the motif suddenly came to the fore and attained affective force. In light of today’s increasingly urgent debates around the relationship between individual and society, between human being and technology, Rosso’s work thus seems “alarmingly alive,” as the British artist Phyllida Barlow (1944–2023) described it while admitting her fascination with the sculptor and his oeuvre.

The exhibition in Basel: 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 is based on yearslong research and preparations by Heike Eipeldauer (mumok); the enlarged version in Basel was co-curated by Elena Filipovic. 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, 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. 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. These encounters are arranged along thematic foci such as “Repetition and Variation,” “Process and Performance,” “Touching, Embracing, Shaping,” “Mise-en-scène,” “Forms Undone,” “Anti-Monumentality,” and “Appearance and Disappearance.” The works on view are drawn from the holdings of the Kunstmuseum Basel and the mumok, Vienna, as well as international collections including the Albertina, Vienna; the Galleria d’Arte Moderna di Milano, Milan; the Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo; the Kunst Museum Winterthur; the Kunsthaus Zürich; the S.M.A.K., Ghent; the Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main; and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; others are provided by the artists themselves or other lenders. The exhibition was produced in collaboration with the Medardo Rosso Estate. The scenography has been designed by Büro Meyer-Grohbruegge.

Artists featured in the exhibition: Medardo Rosso with Giovanni Anselmo (1934–2023), Francis Bacon (1909–1992), Nairy Baghramian (b. 1971), Olga Balema (b. 1984), Phyllida Barlow (1944–2023), Lynda Benglis (b. 1941), Umberto Boccioni (1882–1916), Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010), Anton Giulio Bragaglia (1890–1960), Constantin Brâncuși (1876–1957), Miriam Cahn (b. 1949), Eugène Carrière (1849–1906), Paul Cezanne (1839–1906), Giorgio de Chirico (1888–1978), Edgar Degas (1834–1917), Jean Dubuffet (1901–1985), Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968), Raymond Duchamp–Villon (1876–1918), Luciano Fabro (1936–2007), Simone Fattal (b. 1942), Peter Fischli (b. 1952), Loïe Fuller (1862–1928), Isa Genzken (b. 1948), Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966), Robert Gober (b. 1954), Felix Gonzalez-Torres (1957–1996), David Hammons (b. 1943), Eva Hesse (1936–1970), Jasper Johns (b. 1930), Hans Josephsohn (1936–1970), Ellsworth Kelly (1923–2015), Käthe Kollwitz (1867–1945), Yayoi Kusama (b. 1929), Maria Lassnig (1919–2014), Sherrie Levine (b. 1947), Matthijs Maris (1839–1917), Sidsel Meineche Hansen (b. 1981), Marisa Merz (1926–2019), Amedeo Modigliani (1884–1920), Henry Moore (1898–1986), Robert Morris (1931–2018), Juan Muñoz (1953–2001), Bruce Nauman (b. 1941), Senga Nengudi (b. 1943), Meret Oppenheim (1913–1985), Giuseppe Penone (b. 1947), Carol Rama (1918–2015), Odilon Redon (1840–1916), Auguste Rodin (1840–1917), Pamela Rosenkranz (b. 1979), Richard Serra (1938–2024), Georges Seurat (1859–1891), Erin Shirreff (b. 1975), Edward Steichen (1879–1973), Alina Szapocznikow (1926–1973), Paul Thek (1933–1988), Rosemarie Trockel (b. 1952), Kaari Upson (1970–2021), Andra Ursuţa (b. 1979), Hannah Villiger (1951–1997), Danh Vō (b. 1975), Andy Warhol (1928–1987), Rebecca Warren (b. 1965), David Weiss (1946–2012), Francesca Woodman (1958–1981).

Matthew C. Wilson’s  Interspecies Interfaces (Part I) is the first chapter of a two-part film project, realized in a joint residency with Emilia Tapprest, which will unfold in two chapters presented in March and June. Focusing on newly evolving contact zones between bats, humans, and technology, the project introduces the concept of “other suns” to challenge the solar-centric hierarchy of perception. Just as the transition to solar and other energy sources requires new ways of thinking and designing, reimagining cultural and technological approaches to perceiving the more-than-human world also demands a shift. In their nocturnal world, bats’ use of echolocation—where sound, rather than light, serves as the primary signal for orientation—presents us with a different strategy for perceiving and interfacing with the environment.

Organized in conjunction with the second Solar Biennale presented by mudac, Soleil·s, the exhibition From Solar to Nocturnal unveils Staring at the Sun by Alice Bucknell and Interspecies Interfaces (Part I) by Matthew C. Wilson, two new productions realized in dialogue with the EPFL scientific community.  

Matthew C. Wilson: Interspecies Interfaces (Part 1) / EPFL Pavilions, Lausanne. Vernissage, March 19, 2025.

Matthew C. Wilson is a filmmaker and artist from the United States based in the Netherlands. In his videos, sculptures, and installations, viewers meet human, non-human, and inter-subjective agents that are entangled with natural processes and shape-shifting historical forces. His projects utilize research-oriented, site-specific, and methodologically eclectic approaches to track the inertia of modernity through contemporary ecological crises and into speculative futures. Wilson holds an MFA in visual arts from Columbia University and has been a participant in the Whitney Independent Study Program, Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, and the Jan van Eyck Academie. He is currently the KNAW – Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences artist-in-residence fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences. His moving image works have screened on Vdrome.org, at the International Film Festival in Rotterdam, the Eye Filmmuseum in Amsterdam, and Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin.

Emilia Tapprest (NVISIBLE.STUDIO) is a Finnish-French filmmaker and visual artist based in Amsterdam. Her collaborative work explores how emerging developments in technology and social imaginaries interact with the post-industrial subject in affective, preconscious, and sensorial ways, often within speculative scenarios. With a background studying industrial and interface design at Aalto University in Helsinki, Tapprest obtained her second degree in fine arts and film at the Sandberg Institute in 2019. Her work has been presented on international platforms such as Vdrome, Kunstverein Schattendorf, Impakt Festival, VISIO European Programme on Artists’ Moving Images, and Bologna Art City. Tapprest is a former resident of the Jan van Eyck Academie (2021), FilmForward (2021), Rupert AiR (2023), Institute for Advanced Study, and Allard Pierson, among others. She is currently tutor in cinematic moving image for the geo-design MA at Design Academy Eindhoven.