The Fondation Beyeler’s upcoming collection display features around 70 works by more than 20 artists. Inspired by Friedrich Schiller’s famous quote “Art is a daughter of freedom” (1795), the new collection display takes the liberty of offering a thematic journey featuring new, surprising and unusual juxtapositions.

In the first room, the exhibition opens with a portrait of the late Amy Winehouse by Marlene Dumas, shown alongside Ferdinand Hodler’s portraits of the mortally ill Valentine Godé-Darel. Louise Bourgeois’s poetic objects intersect with paintings by her contemporaries Ad Reinhardt and Barnett Newman. Reinhardt’s Abstract painting (1956), a pared down composition of black layers of paint, was recently gifted to the collection. Alberto Giacometti and Ferdinand Hodler are given a central room of the collection display. While Hodler's summit views derive their monumental effect from the shift between proximity and distance, Giacometti plays with different proportions and viewpoints.

The next room is dedicated to Pablo Picasso and Francis Bacon. Both artists turned painting into an eminently bodily experience by transposing the human body onto the canvas with striking immediacy. The display features further themed rooms showcasing masterpieces from the collection by, among others, Paul Cézanne, Édouard Manet, Elizabeth Peyton, Peter Doig, Wassily Kandinsky, Jean Dubuffet, Piet Mondrian, Alexander Calder, Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso.

One entire room is devoted to the internationally influential sculptor Thomas Schütte. The artist celebrates his 70th birthday this year and will be honoured with a comprehensive retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In Riehen, his bronze and glass head sculptures are shown alongside drawings and watercolours. This monographic room provides an opportunity to display a selection of Schütte’s works from the Beyeler Collection for the very first time.

The exhibition closes with a constellation of works that highlights the collection’s modernist spirit: Henri Rousseau’s large jungle picture is displayed alongside works by Mark Rothko and Claude Monet. All three artists epitomise the endless possibilities of colour within painting, the power of art, and the immediacy of experience. To this day, the images they created allow viewers to experience the freedom of losing themselves.

As Friedrich Schiller wrote in 1795, “Art is a daughter of freedom”. At a time when freedom and thus art appear under threat, his words seem more relevant than ever.

The collection display is curated by Ulf Küster, Senior Curator, Fondation Beyeler, with the participation of the Fondation Beyeler’s Young think tank, which curated the Schütte room and developed its own art mediation programme.