Change games
... with new highlights
24 October 2020 - 7 March 2021, Kunstmuseum
Change games characterize the exhibition of the permanent collection: new groupings, shifts in emphasis, unexpected combinations. The works on view present an inspiring retrospective of 550 years of art history, from Herlin’s medieval piety and religious paintings of post-Byzantine icons to van Goyen’s Dutch realism, the varied styles of the 19th century exemplified by Delacroix and Spitzweg, Monet’s impressionistic experiments, and the unsettling modern worldview of the Expressionist Kirchner.
… with New Highlights: It is a stroke of luck for a mid-sized museum to gain top-notch works of older art. As the title of a previous exhibition declared: a miracle of old masters! This is thanks to the donation from Maria and Johannes Krüppel-Stärk and the acquisition of René and Lotti Gürtler’s collection of icons. And for many years the art historian and patron Annette Bühler has regularly and unexpectedly gifted outstanding historical masterpieces to the Kunstmuseum St. Gallen.
Thanks to her generosity, the museum now possesses a group Italian Baroque paintings. Recently the characters pieces by the brothers Ubaldo and Gaetano Gandolfi were joined by a magical Head of a Girl (around 1700) by Benedetto Luti (1666–1724), who worked in Rome. In 2016 the museum received a donation of the spectacular Coronation of Mary by Heinrich Iselin from Konstanz, followed recently by another rarity: an important work by the Ulm carver Daniel Mauch (1477–1540). The masterly relief of St. Aegidius (around 1530) exemplifies the overcoming of the Gothic style in favor of the new Renaissance view—the birth of our current individual conception of the human being.
Curators: Matthias Wohlgemuth and Samuel Reller