From Calder to Ghirri, Lugano's MASI presents the 2024 exhibition program

Luigi Ghirri, Alexander Calder, Shahryar Nashat. They are some of the protagonists of the 2024 exhibition season of the Museo d’Arte della Svizzera Italiana - MASI in Lugano, which for this year presents a rich program between art, photography, contemporary research.

MASI’s 2024 opens with a tribute exhibition to a great Swiss artist, Ernst Scheidegger (Rorschach, 1923 - Zurich, 2016), open from Feb. 18 to July 21. The exhibition, in collaboration with the Kunsthaus Zürich and the Stiftung Ernst Scheidegger-Archiv, comes on the heels of activities marking the centenary of the birth of the photographer who wrote an important chapter in the history of international photography. Active as a photojournalist and collaborator with the renowned Magnum Photos agency and a frequent visitor to the Parisian avant-garde art scene, Scheidegger is known for artist portraits-including those that have become iconic of Alberto Giacometti, a lifelong friend. The exhibition at MASI traces the Swiss photographer’s output through a selection of youthful shots from the decade 1945 -1955, mostly previously unpublished, and the famous artist portraits, which will be in dialogue with a selection of works by the women and men artists from time to time immortalized. The exhibition “Face to Face. Giacometti, Dalí, Miró, Ernst, Chagall. Homage to Ernst Scheidegger” will be open to the public from Feb. 18 to July 21.

The focus on great photography opens to an international gaze in the fall of 2024, specifically from Sept. 8, 2024 to Jan. 26, 2025, with a solo exhibition dedicated to Luigi Ghirri (Scandiano, 1943 - Roncocesi, 1992), just over 30 years after his untimely death. “Luigi Ghirri - The Journey. Photographs 1970-1991” is the title of the exhibition that highlights, through about 150 prints, the Italian photographer’s different perspectives on travel, understood not only as an experience but also as an imaginary dimension. In this sense, alongside tourist destinations, often immortalized out of season, the exhibition will also present photographs of maps, atlases, advertising images and postcards through an exhibition itinerary conceived as a free labyrinth that unravels among the “sentimental geographies” of one of the pioneers of twentieth-century photography.

Looking instead at the most current contemporary research, the exhibition by Swiss artist Shahryar Nashat, titled Streams of Spleen, will present a striking immersive installation at MASI from March 17 to Aug. 18. For the exhibition project, designed for the underground hall, the artist will completely disrupt the museum space and its atmosphere by intervening on the floor, pillars, lights and walls of the hall. Among the works on display will be unseen sculptures and a video on a screen integrated into the architecture. Shahryar Nashat (Geneva, 1975) likes to intervene in spaces to create a cohesive multisensory environment, and in his works he often experiments with unconventional materials, such as urethane rubber, resins, or glossy gel. Central to the artist’s research is the human body, in its interactions and sensations, in its fragility and resilience. In a historical moment in which technologies filter much of our bodily experience, Nashat’s work is extremely stimulating because, starting from interventions on physical perception, it manages to trigger a reflection on the human condition.

Space then goes to a great 20th-century artist, Alexander Calder, with the exhibition Calder. Sculpting Time, which will explore the profound and transformative impact of one of the 20th century’s most revolutionary artists through a focused focus. Alexander Calder (Lawnton, Pennsylvania, 1898 - New York, 1976) changed the way we perceive and interact with sculpture by introducing the fourth dimension of time into art with his legendary “Mobiles,” a term coined by Marcel Duchamp that in French refers to both “movement” and “pattern,” and by exploring volumes and voids in his stabiles, as Jean Arp christened his stationary objects. The exhibition, from May 5 to October 6, will include more than thirty masterpieces made between 1930 and 1960 (Calder’s most innovative and prolific years) from early abstractions or sphériques to a magnificent selection of mobiles, stabiles and standing mobiles of various sizes. Sculpting Time will also present an extensive series of Calder’s “Constellations,” a term proposed by Duchamp and James Johnson Sweeney for the artist’s beloved objects made of wood and wire in 1943, a time when sheet metal was in short supply due to World War II.

In 2024, MASI continues to provide space for contemporary Swiss creation. During the summer, from June to August, the exhibition of the winner or winner of the Bally Artist Award, the prize that each year the Bally Foundation, in collaboration with MASI, gives to an artist or artist active in the Swiss territory, will take place at the Palazzo Reali. From October 2024 to January 2025, on the other hand, the halls of the LAC will host the exhibition of artist Johanna Kotlaris (Zurich, 1988), winner for Ticino of the Manor 2024 Cultural Award, who will conceive an exhibition project for the occasion.

Finally, the busy 2024 season closes in the fall with new insight into the history of art in Canton Ticino and the museum’s collections. The exhibition “From Davos to Obino. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and the Artists of the Rot-Blau Group,” from Nov. 17, 2024 to March 23, 2025, presents the work of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880-1938) and highlights, in particular, the influence he had on the generation of young Swiss artists in the development of their expressionist pictorial and sculptural language. The selection of some 20 paintings by Kirchner, from prestigious Swiss and European public and private collections, is thus intended to contextualize an important page in local and national artistic history.

From Calder to Ghirri, Lugano's MASI presents the 2024 exhibition program

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