For decades, there have been close links between the histories of art and shop window display. Besides Jean Tinguely, many other artists have designed pioneering window displays. Conversely, window displays frequently feature as a motif in artworks or serve as a stage for performances and actions. The exhibition will explore this eventful relationship from its beginnings to the present day, while artistic interventions in shop windows in Basel extend the show into public space.
Museum Exhibition
Sturtevant: Fresh Window The Art of Display & Display of Art Group Exhibition at the Museum Tinguely
4 December 2024—11 May 2025
Museum Tinguely, Basel, Switzerland
Art and shop windows may seem like unusual partners, but if one takes a look at their shared history of shop window displays, one finds a long tradition. In the late nineteenth century, when window displays developed into a central element of modern consumer culture, people soon began to think about the potential for presenting commodities in aesthetic ways. With surprising and creative displays, such windows were the store’s street-facing calling card, inviting people to stop and look, around the clock, as well as informing passersby about special offers, always with the aim of generating sales.
Artists soon began exploring this new phenomenon. Following Marcel Duchamp's absurd take on the window’s functions and meanings in his 1920 work Fresh Widow, Sturtevant, known for her pioneering repetitions of works by other artists, created the work on view in the exhibition.
The exhibition extends out into the streets of Basel with interventions in shop windows. For this part of the show, Museum Tinguely is cooperating with StadtKonzeptBasel and students from the Institute Art Gender Nature HGK Basel FHNW who will create installations and performances in various shop windows between January and March 2025.
The American artist Sturtevant is best known for her repetitions of the works of other artists, which she recreated manually from memory after having seen a piece that intrigued her. These can immediately be identified with the original, but they are not copies. The artists with whose work she engaged include her contemporaries in American Pop – Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, James Rosenquist, Andy Warhol and Tom Wesselmann – as well as Marcel Duchamp, Joseph Beuys, Frank Stella, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Keith Haring and Anselm Kiefer, among others. Her aim was not to achieve an exact replica, but rather to address notions of authorship, authenticity and originality that would later come to the fore in our own digital age, characterised by the endless circulation and recombination of images.
