BASEL.- This past weekend, after some three and a half years of building work, the new building designed by the Basel-based architectural practice, Christ & Gantenbein, opened along with the partly-renovated main building. Together with the Kunstmuseum Basel | Gegenwart, the Kunstmuseum Basel now comprises three buildings. The large special exhibition Sculpture on the Move 1946–2016 and the exhibition Barnett Newman – Drawings and Prints are also open and free to visit.

The new building provides an exhibition space that meets the most exacting demands of art presentation today, and in future it will house all major special exhibitions. It will also, however, provide more presentation space for the world-famous and constantly growing permanent collection of the Kunstmuseum Basel. Together, the three buildings offer around 10,000 square metres of exhibition space. Furthermore, the city of Basel also gains another cultural and architectural highlight with this new building.

The main building, which reopened after around thirteen months of partial renovation that provides new spaces for the bookshop and art education workshops, as well as a structural addition providing an underground link to the new building, displays European art from the 15th century to the later work of Picasso and Gerhard Richter. On the ground floor in the garden halls, the focus is on Swiss art, the majority of which are works by Basel artists. Apart from the special exhibitions, the new building also houses collections from between 1950 and 1990, with special emphasis on American art. Finally, the Kunstmuseum Basel | Gegenwart on the St. Alban-Rheinweg, which is around five minutes’ walk from the new building, will tend to exhibit contemporary artistic productivity from 1990 to the present.

The new and enlarged Kunstmuseum Basel reopened with the major special exhibition Sculpture on the Move 1946–2016. This exhibition, curated by Bernhard Mendes Bürgi, maps the extraordinarily dynamic evolution of how the classical idea and form of sculpture have become more flexible and abstract, appropriating the trivial stuff of everyday life or blurring spatial or conceptual boundaries, but also constituting itself anew by returning to the figurative tradition. It is housed both in the new building and in the Kunstmuseum Basel | Gegenwart.

The Department of Prints and Drawings (Kupferstichkabinett) in the main building of the Kunstmuseum Basel meanwhile presents the exhibition Barnett Newman – Drawings and Prints, curated by Anita Haldemann.