Medardo Rosso

Sculptor, photographer, and master of artful staging, rival to Auguste Rodin and role model for countless artists: Medardo Rosso (1858–1928) revolutionized sculpture around 1900. Despite his wide-ranging influence, the Italo-French artist remains little known today. This comprehensive retrospective, organized in cooperation with mumok, Vienna, aims to change this, showcasing nearly fifty of his bronze, plaster, and wax sculptures and hundreds of his photographs and drawings to trace the artist’s radical formal, material, and technical explorations.

Rosso’s sculptures are anti-monumental and fundamentally human-scaled, walking a tightrope between presence and dissolution. He created animated surfaces that attempted to capture shifting light and perception—hailed in his day as a sculptural version of Impressionism. He was also deeply invested in modern ideas of reproduction, often using photography as a conceptual model and sculptural tool. Inspired by Rosso’s own display strategies, the exhibition includes work by artists from the last hundred years whose concerns and approaches resonate with Rosso’s.

Twenty years after the first and last retrospective in Switzerland, the comprehensive exhibition Inventing Modern Sculpture puts special emphasis on reconstructing Rosso’s experimental and intermedia approach. It is based on yearslong research and preparations by Heike Eipeldauer (mumok); the enlarged version in Basel was co-curated by Elena Filipovic. It gathers around fifty bronze, plaster, and wax sculptures by the artist, including key pieces, and hundreds of photographs and drawings. Many of these works have rarely been on view outside Italy in the past several decades.

In keeping with the principle of comparative vision espoused by the artist himself, the exhibition presents his works in “conversation” with more than sixty historic and contemporary photographs, paintings, sculptures, and videos. In encounters across the generations, Rosso thus meets artists from his own time to the present. The Basel version of the exhibition expands on the one in Vienna by adding works by Umberto Boccioni, Mary Cassatt, Marcel Duchamp, Peter Fischli / David Weiss, Sidsel Meineche Hansen, Meret Oppenheim, Simone Fattal, Guiseppe Penone, Odilon Redon, Pamela Rosenkranz, Kaari Upson, Andra Ursuţa, and Danh Võ.

The exhibition begins in the Hauptbau’s courtyard, where Rodin’s Burghers of Calais (1884–1889) come face to face with a work by Pamela Rosenkranz. From the Hauptbau, the visitors proceed through the underground concourse and past an expansive work by Kaari Upson to the Neubau, where a monographic presentation of Rosso’s art is on view on the ground floor.

Medardo Rosso – Inventing Modern Sculpture was created in close collaboration with the Medardo Rosso Estate and is a cooperation with the mumok - Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Wien.