This exhibition brings historical works from the Bass Museum together with contemporary works borrowed from renowned local and national collections to create a dialogue between the past and present. Included in the exhibition are works by 17th, 18th, and 19th century masters such as Delacroix, Rubens, Goya, Rigaud and Hoppner, which are shown juxtaposed with pioneering artists of our day such as Joseph Beuys, Charles Ledray, Byron Kim, Jonathan Monk and Eve Sussman.

This exhibition illustrates that all art, regardless of when it was created, is contemporary because it reflects a precise moment in time and communicates the issues surrounding the artists, whether spiritual, political, economic or cultural.

Guest curator: Steve Holmes,
Curator of the Cartin Collection in Hartford, Connecticut.

The opening reception will be Thursday, April 16, 7-9pm.
Free for Bass members, $10 non-members.

Mexican based artist, Francis Alÿs (b. 1959, Antwerp, Belgium), investigates a sense of desolation in his video The Night Watch (2004), which takes place in the famed National Portrait Gallery in London. The subject matter of the film is a fox exploring the Tudor and Georgian rooms while being filmed from the high viewpoint of the museum's state-of-the-art security cameras. The animal scampers from room to room appearing confused and out of context as the cameras capture its every move.

The Night Watch was created as part of a five-year project called Seven Walks, which delves into the everyday rituals and habits of the city and was organized by the London-based organization Artangel.

Framing the Altarpiece celebrates the re-installation of one of the Bass’s masterpieces, The Coronation of the Virgin, attributed to Sandro Botticelli and Domenico Ghirlandaio, and re-introduces several significant Renaissance altarpieces from Italy, Spain, Germany, and the Netherlands. Altarpieces that once functioned as religious objects within churches were also works of art, recognized as such today in the secular space of the museum or private collection, an ambiguity mediated, then and now, by their frames.

The Bass exhibition explores the relation of the frame to the altarpiece, sculpture to painting, abstract decorative to naturalistic elements, the material to the immaterial, and thereby reveals how the modern painting, hanging on the wall as the creation of an exceptional individual, derives from a crucial transition in Medieval and Renaissance art.

Curated by Dr. Benjamin Binstock, Adjunct Curator of Renaissance and Baroque Art