Art and Culture in the Media #20

THE FIRST Roma artist to represent her home country Poland at the Venice Biennale 2022: Malgorzata Mirga Tas (*1978). Then came the big leap in her career. Her solo exhibition at the Art Museum Lucerne (from 8 March) tells the story of the Roma in large textile pictures. Mirga Tas sews these from fabrics collected from family and friends with women from her community to create scenes that deal with the everyday life of the Roma, oppression and legends, to name just a few.

THE ONLY woman among the Arte Povera artists: Marisa Merz (1926-2019). Merz gave a poetic, calm, fragile touch to the Italian style that utilised ‘poor’, in the sense of recycled, everyday materials. The artist, who was regarded as a leader in those years, will have the largest retrospective in Switzerland for 30 years at the Kunstmuseum Bern (from 31 January) under the lyrical title ‘Ascoltare lo spazio - Listen to the Space’.

THE CRITICAL artist Anne Marie Jehle (1937-2000) is hardly known today. When she withdrew from the public eye in the mid-1980s, her artistic work came to an abrupt halt. The Art Museum St. Gallen is showing (until 9 March) her visionary, expressive work, which deals with social structures and power relations, female identity and role models. And thus makes her work significant for today's discussion on self-determination.

THE BOLD museum barrier-breaker and art expert-comedian-influencer-freestyle rapper Jakob Schwerdtfeger. His book ‘Ich sehe was, was du nicht siehst, und das ist Kunst’ (‘I see something you don't see, and that's art’ ) is crazy. Surprising anecdotes take a cheeky look at art and personal stories. For example, that actor Sylvester Stallone began to define and train his own body image at the age of 12 when he saw a museum painting of muscular figures by Peter Paul Rubens.  

THE RUTHLESS centenary ‘The New Objectivity’ at the Kunsthalle Mannheim (until 9 March) delves deep into the history of art in the 1920s. Over 200 works impressively reflect themes that are more topical than ever: whether human vulnerability, social upheavals, provocative and melancholy portraits or moral images - the razor-sharp painting of the Weimar Republic reveals truths with a cool, unemotional gaze.