To Plunge and Emerge

The exhibition series featuring contemporary art will be continued in the cabinet. Installative arrangements consisting of drawings, offset prints and photographs by the Basel artist Cécile Hummel stimulate the viewer to an associative involvement with the depicted.

The core of the exhibition in the Museum Franz Gertsch is formed by Cécile Hummel’s gouache drawings on paper executed in glazed tones of gray. They provide insights into Cécile Hummel’s recent work dealing with our “collective memory.” Her mostly small - format works made from memory preserve the seen, the observed and the experienced reduced down to their essential elements. The depictions veer between figuration and abstraction; clearly identifiable objects and characters coexist alongside architectural forms and compositions, the meanings of which remain open- ended. Diverse networks, cross-references and associations emerge from their arrangement into groups. The drawings are supplemented, completed and facetted in the installative hanging by individual or grouped offset prints and photographs.

The offset prints are based on a convolute of glass negatives dating from the nineteen thirties, which Cécile Hummel purchased in Southern Italy. Various people, couples and families appear in the same photo studio with the same props as if frozen in time. Familiar and yet strange, human and yet staged, the portrayed sitters take up contact with the viewer over and above the boundaries of time by means of their glances.

Cécile Hummel’s photographs in turn capture a moment or places and objects that point to the past, for example her views of a library in Palermo, a storage facility of knowledge that is falling into decay.

The associating, meandering view causes the visitor to fall under the spell of this pictorial world, to become immersed in the drawn spaces and strange pasts. He follows the tracks of others and senses his own past and present at the same time. Cécile Hummel processes and questions the pictorial world that surrounds us and pursues its meaning for the here and now.

The exhibition was curated by Anna Wesle in collaboration with the artist.

Opening: Friday, September 21st, 2012 at 6.30 p.m.

Veranstaltungen zur Ausstellung:

• LehrerInnen-Einführung: Mittwoch, 24.10.2012, 16.30–17.30 Uhr

• Künstlergespräch: Cécile Hummel im Gespräch mit San Keller und Anna Wesle, Sonntag, 28.10.2012, 11 Uhr

• Kuratorenführung: Sonntag, 04.11.2012, 11–12 Uhr

• Workshop: Cécile Hummel, Samstag, 17.11.2012, 10–17 Uhr

www.cecilehummel.ch