The Infinity of Space. Spatial Concepts in Modernism

 31/10/2026 – 12/09/2027

Since the Renaissance at the latest, the construction of pictorial space has been the most significant principle of the visual arts. The canvas is understood as an open window, affording a view onto another reality. The composition – from balanced to dynamic – lends support to the statement made by the depiction. In modernism, by contrast, the picture confronts viewers as a real surface. The infinity of painting is superseded by new concepts of space that interlock image and reality by a variety of means. Expressionism, for instance, creates spaces out of unusually steep perspectives, while Constructivism gives pictorial form to its non-objective spatial compositions as utopian architectures. The turn away from the object makes pictorial space a site to be newly negotiated, one that may confront viewers as flat and without depth, or else continue to meet them as infinity. 

With works by Max Bill, Miriam Böhm, Gianni Colombo, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, El Lissitzky, Gerold Miller, Lyubov Popova and others.

Curator: Julia Nebenführ