BADEN-BADEN.- This year’s comprehensive summer exhibition at the Museum Frieder Burda puts the emphasis on the dialogue between painting and sculpture. The show, that runs from July 5 to October 26, 2008, is entitled “Sculpture by Painters – Painting in Dialogue with Plastic Art”. It displays approximately 140 20th century art works by Degas, Miró, Picasso, Modigliani, Giacometti, Chagall, Kirchner, Beckmann and Baselitz. For the first time ever, the Museum in Baden-Baden presents an exhibition combining painting with sculpture on a large scale.

A juxtaposition of paintings and sculptures is planned. Also on show are works by Willem De Kooning, Paul Gauguin, Henri Matisse, Georges Braque, Jean Dubuffet, Antoni Tapies and Max Ernst. All together more than 20 internationally renowned artists are exhibited.

Curator Jean-Louis Prat: “The 20th century is rich in artists, who have been painters as well as sculptors - great creative minds, painters actually, who used their sculptural experiences to live a new adventure. The discovery of space made many of them quit, at least for a certain time, the color and bi-dimensionality of painting. By combining traditional and reinvented materials, they created sculptures to express their own sensitivity and temperament. They attributed increased importance to the concept of idea. From that moment on, sculpture was becoming real.”

Prat, an internationally esteemed expert on sculpture, was director of the renowned Maeght Foundation in St-Paul de Vence in France for over 30 years. In 2006, he curated the extraordinary Chagall retrospective at the Frieder Burda Museum in Baden-Baden, which attracted more than 190.000 visitors.

Frieder Burda: „I’m very happy that the museum finally succeeded in organizing a sculpture exhibition in Baden-Baden. I’ve always desired to make the museum a venue for exhibitions combining sculpture and painting. We have worked hard to make this dream come true.“

More than 40 internationally renowned collections and museums, mostly from France, Switzerland and Germany, but also from the United States and Spain, have agreed to contribute to this major summer exhibition in 2008.

A catalogue will be published for the exhibition (Hatje Cantz, 288 pages, 232 pictures, 179 of which coloured, hardback with book-jacket, EUR 29,00. Publisher: Foundation Frieder Burda, introduction by Jean-Louis Prat, texts by Jean-Louis Prat, Caroline Edde, Frank Schmidt). German and French edition: ISBN 978-3-7757-2244-5 (German), ISBN 978-3-7757-2245-2 (French)

List of participating artists:
Georg Baselitz, Max Beckmann, Georges Braque, Marc Chagall, Honoré Daumier, Edgar Degas, Jean Dubuffet, Max Ernst, Paul Gauguin, Alberto Giacometti, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Yves Klein, Willem de Kooning, Markus Lüpertz, Henri Matisse, Joan Miró, Amedeo Modigliani, A.R. Penck, Pablo Picasso, Antoni Tàpies, Cy Twombly.