For the first time, the Kunst Museum Winterthur offers an insight into its collection of works by female artists dealing with sculptural aspects of form, body and space.

The exhibition opens with a ‘classical’ scuplture of a male nude figure by Germaine Richier from 1940. One of her students, the Winterthur artist Margrit Gsell-Heer, is also represented in the collection by her bronze casts. Her sculptures stand in contrast to Meret Oppenheim’s Idol, where the body is merely suggested. At the same time, while the human presence is nothing but a reminiscence in the sculptures by Heidi Bucher, Marisa Merz has always concentrated on the figure, as illustrate her sculptures with delicate heads of unbaked clay or filigree objects made of knitted copper wire.

Also Isa Genzken’s Meister Gerhard evokes a human figure, however, the occupation of space is of prior importance. Finally, the objects of the German-American Ruth Vollmer and those of Rita McBride also play with the physicality of space, which the sculptures seize confidently and naturally.