Now on view:
Francesca Woodman in Medardo Rosso: Inventing Modern Sculpture
Kunstmuseum Basel
Basel, Switzerland
through August 10

This Art Basel, visit the Kunstmuseum Basel to see Francesca Woodman’s photographs featured in Medardo Rosso: Inventing Modern Sculpture. Curated by Heike Eipeldauer and Elena Filipovic in collaboration with Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, this exhibition explores Rosso’s undoing of forms, experimentation with materiality, and his challenge to the very notion of sculpture as final and fixed. Woodman’s works are on view alongside works by Eva Hesse, Marcel Duchamp, Alberto Giacometti, Giorgio de Chirico, Danh Võ, and others.

Beginning in 1904, Medardo Rosso presented his sculptures in specially produced glass showcases on wooden pedestals, known as “gabbie” (Italian for “cages”). These structures, precisely tailored to his works, provided a tangible anchoring in space. Rather than separating his sculptures from their surroundings, Rosso’s gabbie seemed to enclose the surrounding environment as an integral component of the works. Woodman’s photographs—which depict the artist repeatedly enclosing herself within architecture and furniture, integrating setting and subject before freezing the image as a photograph—echo the framing and mise en scène of Rosso’s sculptures.