BASEL.- The three-part exhibition Painting on the Move of 2002 was held not just in the affiliated Kunstmuseum and Museum für Gegenwartskunst but in Kunsthalle Basel, too. With its panoply of painterly explorations of the world, it traced a vast arc from the early twentieth century to the dawn of the new millennium.

Conceived as a curatorial counterpart, Sculpture on the Move focuses on sculpture from the end of the Second World War to the present. This major exhibition to marks the inauguration of Kunstmuseum Basel’s new building visualizing the extraordinary dynamism underlying sculpture’s development, revealing how the classical notions defining it came unstuck, how it ventured beyond the representation of visible reality and became abstract, how it took on the banality of the everyday object, and how even after breaking out of its spatial and conceptual confines it regrouped to revisit the figurative. The selection of works from Kunstmuseum Basel’s own collection, flanked by important loans from international museums and private collections, promises an exhibition of exceptional density and diversity.

The exhibition begins with some late works of the great Constantin Brancusi and Alberto Giacometti in the top-lit galleries on the second floor of the new building designed by the architects Christ & Gantenbein. The loosely chronological sequence that follows highlights various aspects of the medium between the 1940s and 1970s, as exemplified by the works of Alexander Calder, Jean Arp, Max Bill, Henry Moore, Louise Bourgeois, Pablo Picasso, Eduardo Chillida, David Smith, Jean Tinguely, Claes Oldenburg, Duane Hanson, John Chamberlain, Donald Judd, Carl Andre, Joseph Beuys, Mario Merz, Bruce Nauman, Eva Hesse, Richard Serra, and Robert Smithson.

The continuation of the tour on the ground floor of the new building focuses on sculpture of the 1980s with works by Peter Fischli and David Weiss, Robert Gober, Charles Ray, Mike Kelley, Jeff Koons, Katharina Fritsch, and Franz West, among others. The third part of the exhibition in the Kunstmuseum Basel | Gegenwart brings us up to the present with important positions of the past three decades, including sculptures by Gabriel Orozco, Matthew Barney, Absalon, Damien Hirst, Danh Vo, Monika Sosnowska, and Oscar Tuazon.