Press conference for the exhibition

Thursday, 6 May 2021, 11 o’clock or personal guided tour on request

Kunst Museum Winterthur | Beim Stadthaus
Museumstrasse 52, CH-8400 Winterthur

Publication

The exhibition is accompanied by a comprehensive catalogue with numerous illustrations and texts by Konrad Bitterli, Lynn Kost and Andrea Lutz.
It is published by Snoeck Publishers, Cologne.

Is contemporary sculpture defined by monuments or is its focus directed towards the moment? The exhibition Moment.Monument at the Kunst Museum Winterthur features sixteen international artistic positions demonstrating the use of time, transience, duration and cultural memory in contemporary sculpture.

A monument – from the Latin monere to remember; monumentum monument – is a man-made building or work of art. In a narrower sense, monument means a memorial and commemorates an historical personality or event. However, a monument always asserts significance and validity.

A broadened concept of sculpture was established in the 1960s at the latest. This challenged the traditional understanding of an artwork as an artefact in favour of procedural approaches that have questioned every dimension of eternal validity. Sculpture today explores the formal possibilities of the past, while redefining its content for the present. Artistic approaches no longer have to assert themselves as radical breaks with tradition; they are now based on formal investigations of the past, linking these with current experiences and creating works that are sustained by their own sensibility.

After the exhibitions on painting (Frozen Gesture, 2019) and video (Bewegte Bilder, 2020), the exhibition Moment.Monument – Aspects of Contemporary Sculpture deals with a largely neglected theme of sculpture: its precarious state between permanence and transience, moment and monument. The artists are concerned with strategies of narration and reminiscence or the poetic impetus that connects art to the world – as monuments of a fragile age. The exhibition features sixteen positions ranging from permanent to transitory, by artists from Phyllida Barlow (*1944) and Mona Hatoum (*1952) to Simon Starling (*1967) and Alicja Kwade (*1979).

Participating artists:

• Phyllida Barlow
• Katinka Bock
• Dora Budor
• Isa Genzken
• Felix Gonzalez-Torres
• Mona Hatoum
• Bethan Huws
• Alicja Kwade
• Manfred Pernice
• Magali Reus
• Thomas Schütte
• Gabriel Sierra
• Roman Signer
• Simon Starling
• Danh Vō
• Erwin Wurm