BASEL.- “Constellations” inaugurates the Fondation Beyeler’s newly expanded ensemble, unfolding across both museum buildings and throughout the enlarged expanse of the park. Individual works will further be featured in the repurposed historical buildings. The exhibition brings together over 200 outstanding works from the museum’s own collection and from private collections closely connected to the institution, giving rise to unique constellations of art, architecture and nature.
“Constellations” unfolds across the Fondation Beyeler’s two museum buildings—Renzo Piano’s iconic Beyeler Museum and Peter Zumthor’s new Wyss Museum. The two buildings offer different perspectives onto the artworks on display. In the Beyeler Museum, the works encounter the familiar architecture that has shaped the experience of art at the Fondation Beyeler for the past 30 years. In the Wyss Museum, the works are positioned in a new context. At the same time, “Constellations” offers visitors the first opportunity to experience the two museum buildings and the landscaped natural spaces that surround them as a cohesive and coherent whole.
Ernst and Hildy Beyeler’s renowned collection is at the heart of the exhibition. Over the years, it has been thoughtfully expanded to include contemporary art. Equally significant for the Fondation Beyeler are its long-standing relationships with other private collections. Around half of the works in the exhibition are on loan from important Swiss and international collections, allowing visitors to experience rarely seen works – most notably from the collection of Hansjörg Wyss, Chairman of the Beyeler-Stiftung and to the principal donor of the new museum building. Further key works are on loan from the Daros Collection, The Easton Foundation, the Calder Foundation, the Collection Hersaint, the Esther Grether Family Collection, the Rudolf Staechelin Collection, the Collection Marx and the Reuben Collection, all of which have long-standing and close relationships with the Fondation Beyeler, as manifested in many long-term or permanent loans.
The exhibition itself is an evolving whole. Visitors who view “Constellations” in autumn 2026 will experience various seasonal changes over the course of 2027. In January and in May, individual works or groups of works will be moved or rearranged, new works will be added and some works will be removed to make space for new constellations. The exhibition thus invites visitors to rediscover the expanded ensemble anew with each season.
On the ground floor of the Wyss Museum, the exhibition is steeped in a direct connection to the nature, water and park that surround the building and whose cumulative influence can be felt through the large windows. Here, Claude Monet’s late painting of water lilies, on the verge of abstraction, encounters Roni Horn’s contemporary glass sculpture Untitled (“A dream dreamt in a dreaming world is not really a dream … but a dream not dreamt is.”), 2010–2012. Monet captures the fleeting light, the reflections on the water and the atmosphere of a moment; Horn responds with her monumental, poetic glass forms in shades of blue and violet, whose appearance shifts with changes in light and viewpoints.
The venerable Impressionist masterpiece and the contemporary sculpture engage in a silent dialogue on the beauty and impermanence of nature. This theme is taken up in Otobong Nkanga’s large-scale tapestry Unearthed – Abyss, 2021, in which the idyllic view of a vivid underwater world is disturbed by strange objects collecting on the seabed. The titular abyss appears as both a real place and an allegory for our planet’s vulnerability.
The Wyss Museum’s middle floor draws us into the depths of the human psyche. Of the building’s three floors, this is also the most inward-looking in architectural terms. Surrealist leanings set the tone for the artworks’ hanging and display. The collection’s long-standing engagement with Surrealism is deepened with significant loans, spanning historical and contemporary positions. The selection features seminal works such as Max Ernst’s stirring painting L’ange du foyer (Le triomphe du surréalisme), 1937, or his enigmatic Swampangel, 1940, as well as René Magritte’s L’art de la conversation, 1962, and Le chant de la violette, 1951, shown alongside a larger group of Magritte’s eerily fantastical pictorial worlds. Nearby, Balthus’ painting Passage du Commerce-Saint-André, 1952–1954, on loan from the Collection Hersaint, draws viewers in with its intensely atmospheric view of a street scene staged as a disconcerting in-between world. Like ghostly puppets on a theatre stage, the depicted characters appear to inhabit a surreal, secret space. Sculptures by Robert Gober – including a foot jutting out from the wall and a burning dollhouse – disrupt the familiar with a sense of unease, directly tying into the psychological and poetic pictorial worlds of Surrealism. A lighter, more playful tone is struck with the juxtaposition of paintings by Joan Miró and sculptures by Alexander Calder.
One Kabinett is devoted to Alexander Calder’s celebrated Constellations from 1943. Made of delicate wooden components and fine wires, these works have no fixed centre – each element exists in a responsive, fragile relation to the others. New forms of equilibrium, visual tensions and perspectives arise – poetically echoing the exhibition’s guiding principle. A second small room displays Alexander Calder’s mobile Snow Flurry, 1950, on loan from Hansjörg Wyss’ collection. Its white metal disks are loosely connected by filigree wire branches and are set in motion by the slightest breeze. In the Fondation Beyeler’s park, Calder’s standing mobile The Tree, 1966, extends this exploration of balance and equilibrium to the outdoors.
The top floor is defined by an elevated perspective and views into the distance. On this level, the works’ selection and presentation are guided by notions of lightness, expansiveness and the sky. Radiating even from a distance, Brice Marden’s painting The Muses, 1991–1993, on loan from the Daros Collection, features a choreography of fluidly dancing lines. Works by Cy Twombly and Joan Mitchell, as well as Agnes Martin and Barnett Newman, each respond in their own way. A group of Twombly’s paintings from the early 1960s, in which his then newly found visual language combining writing, mythology and pure emotion finds eloquent expression, is set alongside Agnes Martin’s contemplative works, with their almost transparent gradations of pastel hues. Constantin Brancusi’s sculpture of a bird and a winter landscape by Ferdinand Hodler underscore the sublime, lofty melody of the space.
The exhibition takes on a different character in the familiar spaces of the Beyeler Museum designed by Renzo Piano. The focus shifts to artists whose work is predominantly figurative, among them key figures within the Fondation Beyeler’s collection. With galleries dedicated to Pablo Picasso, Marlene Dumas, Willem de Kooning, Ferdinand Hodler and Alberto Giacometti, the visual power of the collection, enriched with significant loans, is on full display. The presentation opens with two monumental sculptures by Joan Miró, Oiseau Lunaire, 1966, from the Beyeler Collection and its counterpart Oiseau, 1981, from the Hansjörg Wyss Collection.
One gallery is dedicated to landscape painting. Works from the Hansjörg Wyss Collection – among them Gauguin’s dramatic seascape La Vague, 1888, Ferdinand Hodler’s meditative views of Swiss lakes and Edward Hopper’s majestic granite boulders – offer a striking panorama of early twentieth-century landscape painting. In the room opening out onto the museum’s water lily pond, Claude Monet’s waterlilies are once again brought together with Roni Horn’s glass sculpture, establishing a connection to the Wyss Museum.
The next room is dedicated to portraiture from the early twentieth century to the present day, with works by artists ranging from Pablo Picasso and Amedeo Modigliani to Marlene Dumas and Elizabeth Peyton. Special emphasis is placed on self-portraiture in its various manifestations: some are only recognisable as such at second glance, like Bruce Nauman’s folded arms or Wolfgang Tillman’s leg. The exhibition in the Beyeler Museum concludes with a room dedicated to Pablo Picasso, who, as the most prominent artist in the collection, also occupies a central position in “Constellations.”
Also unfolding throughout the enlarged expanse of the park and in the historical buildings, “Constellations” truly extends across the entire newly expanded ensemble. Perched on the roof edge of the Wyss Museum, its legs boldly dangling over the sheer drop, Maurizio Cattelan’s sculpture of a little drummer greets visitors with a drum roll. Japanese artist Fujiko Nakaya’s fog sculpture transforms the familiar expanse of the park into an ephemeral, elusive dreamscape. At the other end of the park, a new sculpture by Rachel Whiteread was conceived specifically for this location. The Beyeler Restaurant’s Kaminzimmer, an intimate fireside dining room, hosts a site-specific work by Rudolf Stingel, who has lined the entire space with Celotex insulation boards, transforming it into a silvery installation that invites visitors to leave their mark.
The exhibition is curated by Sam Keller, Director of the Fondation Beyeler, and Theodora Vischer, Chief Curator of the Fondation Beyeler.
