A neglected art form in focus

A survey exhibition on reliefs is a specialty: the exhibition OUTSTANDING! The Relief from Rodin to Taeuber-Arp is the first of its kind in 40 years. Previously, it was on view from May to September at the Städel Museum in Frankfurt am Main. The origins of relief go back a long way, with the oldest preliminary forms made around 35,000 BC. After the heyday of relief in antiquity, it moved sometimes more sometimes less inconspicuously between painting and sculpture. It was not until the 19th century that the form was slowly recognized as an art field in its own right. This is the starting point of the exhibition, which follows the relief in the following decades, marked by tremendous upheavals, until the 1960s. Around 130 exhibits by over 100 artists, some of them world-famous, will be on display in Hamburg from October 13, 2023 to February 25, 2024, and promise exciting insights into a lesser-known area of art history.

At the beginning of the 19th century, the focus was still on antiquity, as can be seen in the example of Bertel Thorvaldsen. Subsequent generations around Auguste Rodin exploded familiar understandings of sculpture and, in the process, of relief. Other great names such as Edgar Degas, Paul Gauguin, Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse explored further new paths that could be taken with this art form. Then, in the 20th century, relief experienced renewed expansion in modernism, for example through the Dadaist Kurt Schwitters or in the relief collages of Hans Arp. Followers of Concrete Art, including Oskar Schlemmer and Sophie Taeuber-Arp, also experimented with relief as a form of expression. For the exhibition, the Hamburger Kunsthalle gathered numerous loans from, among others, the Kunstmuseum Basel, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen in Rotterdam.