Photo Credit: “Vendedora de zacates (Sponge vendor),” Oaxaca, 1974, by Graciela Iturbide.

Location: Second and Fourth Floor Galleries
Time Period: Early 20th Century

As part of In Focus/Enfoque, the collaborative exhibition between several Charlotte area cultural institutions, the Bechtler will have two exhibitions on view in late 2017 and early 2018. Read more about In Focus/Enfoque below. See the full lineup of In Focus/Enfoque exhibitions here. Lea esta página en español.

Paul Strand in Mexico – September 1, 2017 to January 7, 2018
Already a respected photographer in the United States, Paul Strand lived in Mexico from 1932 to 1935 where he worked on Redes (1936), a film commissioned by the Mexican Secretariat of Public Education, and photographed the changing landscape and people of Mexico. Strand traveled the countryside photographing the small towns, churches, and the people who occupied the land. Twenty images were selected and published as a portfolio in 1940, titled Photographs of Mexico.

Maestros Mexicanos de la Fotografía Moderna: Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Manuel Carrillo, Flor Garduño, Graciela Iturbide y Mariana Yampolsky: Works from the Bank of America Collection. September 29, 2017 to March 4, 2018  
The mid-20th century was a time of great change in post-Revolutionary Mexico as the sociopolitical landscape struggled to find stability. In these decades of flux, many artists captured the country’s efforts to establish a unified Mexican cultural identity. Maestros mexicanos de la fotografia moderna focuses on five modernist photographers who documented this period: Manuel Álvarez Bravo (Mexican, 1902–2002), Manuel Carrillo (Mexican, 1906–1989), Flor Garduño (Mexican, born 1957), Graciela Iturbide (Mexican, born 1942), and Mariana Yampolsky (Mexican, 1925–2002).

In Focus: Contemporary Photography in Mexico
In Focus/Enfoque, an ambitious multi-institution exhibition of contemporary Mexican photography, will take place in Charlotte from August 2017 through spring 2018. Inspired by the highly successful Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, this unique collaboration features more than 50 artists from Mexico and the United States. As an exploration of diverse topics and themes—including design, gender, activism, identity, globalism, and borders—In Focus/Enfoque will showcase a wide variety of contemporary art in dialogue with the Queen City.

As a major supporter of arts and culture across the region, Bank of America led the planning, collaboration, and funding of In Focus/Enfoque. The Arts & Science Council is supporting collaborative community engagement and programming efforts.

Thursday, September 14  |  6:00 PM  |  Buy Tickets

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In June 1946, the sculptor and photographer Michel Sima met with Pablo Picasso in Antibes. At Picasso’s request, day after day Sima photographed Picasso’s works-in-progress in the workshop he found for him at Grimaldi Palace. The artists’ work and friendship eventually resulted in the creation of the Picasso Museum. This unique showcase in Antibes has recently been renovated and the works of art returned to their proper home, providing visitors the opportunity to step into a moment in art history.

TIME
An event reception with a cash-only bar and free light bites begins at 6 p.m. in the Bechtler lobby followed by the presentation and film screening at 7 p.m. in the Wells Fargo Auditorium.

TICKETS
Tickets are $10 for the public, $8 for museum members and $5 for students (Student tickets may be purchased at the door or by phone. Must present student ID to claim). Buy tickets online, tickets may also be purchased by phone at 704.353.9200 or at the admissions desk.

Photo Credit: Jean Tinguely, Santana, 1966, painted black iron, wood and electric motor. © 2017 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

Location: Fourth-floor Gallery
Time Period: May 12, 2017 – September 10, 2017

From May 12, 2017, through September 10, 2017, the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art will present Celebrating Jean Tinguely and Santana, a survey of over 80 artworks spanning the forty-year career of this revolutionary Swiss kinetic artist.

Starting in the mid-20th-century, Swiss native Jean Tinguely cobbled art together with a tinker’s touch. The son of a factory mechanic, Tinguely first started making art as a child, wandering the woods outside his home in Basel, mounting small water wheels in the creeks to create sound sculptures. He made art out of what he knew and what surrounded him, the natural movement found in the world with the industrial materials lying around his house.

He moved to Paris in 1953 and would spend the rest of the decade pioneering kinetic art, beginning with gently bouncing springs or swinging arms and advancing to automatic drawing machines called Meta-mechanics, which, like a carnival fortune teller, would make you a drawing for the price of a token. This performative element of the work married to the acknowledgment of the viewer as a participant would continue throughout the next forty years of Tinguely’s work. Some of the work remained interactive, with the viewer activating the sculpture with the push of a button, but in others, the sculptures whirl with balletic grace continually as in the Stravinsky Fountain in Paris, done in partnership with his frequent collaborator Niki de Saint Phalle, or clank occasionally to life in solitude as in Cyclops, the monumental installation hidden in the French forest of Milly-le-Forêt.

Tinguely continues to be well-known and well-loved in Europe 23 years after his death in 1993. He is equally influential among artists in the United States, though he is less well-known by the general public. Yet his legacy can be seen in contemporary art being made throughout the world, and in the immediate North Carolina region.

The Bechtler Museum of Modern Art is in a unique position to mount an exhibition of Tinguely’s work. The museum has three major sculptures in the collection, as well as numerous prints and drawings illustrating Tinguely’s process. The Bechtler also benefits by its proximity to Tinguely’s last major commission, Cascade, located in the Carillon building on Trade and Church in uptown Charlotte. Finally, we have the personal connection of our founding patron, Andreas Bechtler and his father, Hans, who had close relationships with the artist and his circle.

For more information, please visit the Bechtler.

From September 30 – April 23, 2017, the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art will present the Bechtler Collection: Relaunched and Rediscovered, an exhibition expanding on works from the museum’s collection including modern and contemporary artists. The impetus for the show comes from extensive new research into the collection and the artists in the holdings, many of whom have very little material available in English. Significant findings from the research will be included in the exhibition.

The Bechtler Collection: Relaunched and Rediscovered will include a number of themes beginning with an introduction to the Bechtler family and the artists with whom they were close including Adolf Luther, Joan Miró, Italo Valenti, and Eduardo Chillida. The exhibition will then examine the Discussion of Space, a central concern for many abstract artists including Victor Vasarely, Angel Duarte, Alexander Archipenko, and Gina Gilmour.

The artists Antoni Tàpies, Pablo Picasso, Marino Marini, Giorgio Morandi, Le Corbusier, Maud Gatewood, Laurent Jiménez-Balaguer, Antonio Zoran Music, Giuseppe Santomaso, Edouard Pignon, Bruno Meier, and Jim Nicholson will be presented with a focus on the many different 20th Century Political Positions taken by artists from identity politics to classicism’s comforting cry for a return to order.

The cultural critique of Pop Art will feature Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Miguel Berrocal, Pol Mara, Rüdiger-Utz Kampmann, and Sam Francis and Walasse Ting’s 1¢ Life (examined last fall in the Bechtler Museum’s Sam Francis survey).

A room devoted to different Philosophical Investigations by artists through their work, will include Chillida’s relationship to the German philosopher Martin Heidegger and Pierre Soulages and Hans Hartung’s existentialism.

Finally, the exhibition will celebrate Concrete Art, one of Switzerland’s most significant contributions to Modern art history, with a presentation of art and texts by Max Bill, Camille Graeser, Robert Gessner, Richard Paul Lohse, Willy Müller-Brittnau, Johann Itten, and Hans Hinterreiter.

Since January 2010, the museum has offered exhibitions that introduced the region to many artists and styles widely admired and collected throughout Europe and Asia, but rarely seen in the United States. Now, with the research yielded through the generous support of the Knight Foundation and MetLife Foundation, the Bechtler is able to offer more significant and insightful artists and artworks in Bechtler Collection: Relaunched and Rediscovered.

The Bechtler family has long been generous with their memories and information and this show expands their contributions, as well. The Bechtler family has shared their family’s memorabilia with the museum so that we can gain more insight of Hans, Bessie, and their children and grandchildren living with the art that Charlotte now enjoys and celebrating with the artists who made these works. The museum’s lobby will feature reproductions of photographs of the family, along with exhibition posters contemporary to the shows in which the Bechtlers first experienced the works we enjoy today.

This exhibition is curated by Jennifer Sudul Edwards, Ph.D., curator at the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art since 2015. It will include an audio guide featuring quotes by the artists presented in the exhibition, and is located on the fourth-floor gallery.

From brooches to monoprints, All That Sparkles will feature artists from the Bechtler collection including Alberto Giacometti, Alicia Penalba, Raffael Benazzi, and Niki de Saint Phalle along with works from Harry Bertoia and Claire Falkenstein. Showcasing an art form often overlooked, this exhibition explores transformation and expansion of artist expression through miniature conversational pieces and wearable art.

View the collection located in the Second-floor Gallery from July 1, 2016 – January 8, 2017.

For more details on this exhibition, please click visit the Bechtler.

The House That Modernism Built

The exhibition will illustrate how the modern aesthetic shaped people’s lives during the 20th century throughout the United States and the affinity of aesthetic and philosophical principles that influenced art and design during this period.  In particular, the show will emphasize process, examining how designers and artists considered and tackled projects and problems, and how the innovations in other disciplines from the sciences to the humanities influenced their direction and thinking. To trace the creative process and critical approach to problem solving, the exhibition will include prototypes, design plans, and manufactured pieces alongside drawings, prints, paintings, and sculptures.

While the scope of the show will be international, it will draw attention to design innovations particularly embraced in the United States with a regional focus on production in North Carolina. The works date from 1920 through 1980, but the groundbreaking choices of material and manufacturing processes by makers such as Victor Vasarely, Zoltan Kemeny, Kenneth Noland, Roy Lichtenstein, Charles and Ray Eames, Alexander Girard, and Buckminster Fuller remain vital, revealing how these larger principles of modernism continue to resonate in our lives today.

View the collection located in the Fourth-floor Gallery from March 24 – September 11, 2016. 

For more details on this exhibition, please click visit the Bechtler.