Joan Mitchell retrospective at Kunsthaus Bregenz

Summer, the season for holidays, trips and culture. If you're on Lake Constance, in Austria we recommend visiting Kunsthaus Bregenz, the museum designed by Swiss architect Peter Zumthor, which is hosting “Joan Mitchell. Retrospective. Her life and paintings” until October, focusing on the American abstract expressionist artist, Joan Mitchell.



What is a museum? This question popped into our minds as we thought about the current explosion of buildings that are so spectacularly unforgettable we often don't remember their content. Well, Kunsthaus Bregenz is the response of 2009 Pritzker prize winning Swiss architect Peter Zumthor to this question.



He decided to create a place for artworks, a place where people can enjoy these artworks in peace and quiet. Zumthor's glass, steel and concrete architecture looks like a lamp from the outside, absorbing the changing light, the haze off the lake, and it gives you a hint of what is happening inside rather than just showing off as some kind of fancy wrapping. 
The museum is supplemented by KUB, a gunpowder grey factory building, which houses the offices, the café and the book shop refurbished in 2013 again by Zumthor.



This truly special architecture is the setting until 25 October 2015 for “Joan Mitchell. Retrospective. Her life and paintings”, an exhibition organised in partnership with the Luwig Museum in Cologne, Germany and the Joan Mitchell Foundation, New York.



Thirty or so paintings - a large-scale exhibition - are on display at Kunsthaus Bregenz, showcasing the whole spectrum of the work of Joan Mitchell (1925-1992) from her early days in the '50s through to her last output.





Joan Mitchell is one of the masters of abstract expressionism, and her art can also be appreciated outside the actual building, on the “billboards”, in the “Open-Air-Gallery” on Bregenzer Seestraße; here, the curator Rudolf Sagmeister and the Joan Mitchell Foundation selected some of the artist's more typical works to set up engagement and sharing between cultural institution and the city as a community.

Christiane Bürklein

Exhibition “Joan Mitchell. Retrospective. Her life and paintings”
Dates: 18 July to 25 October 2015
Location: Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria http://www.kunsthaus-bregenz.at/
Images of the exhibition: Markus Tretter © Courtesy of the Joan Mitchell Foundation und Kunsthaus Bregenz - Images KUB Billboards Rudolf Sagmeister