Exhibitions: countryside selection
For its special week dedicated to the countryside, AA’s editorial team selected five exhibitions exploring the topics from a variety of perspectives: photography, painting, outdoor art installations, student productions and architect’s monography… A cultural jumble for architecture and art enthusiasts interested in the topic.
Rural Rebellion
Berlin, Aedes Architecture Forum, until January 24, 2025
Studio Christoph Hesse Architects takes on the monographic exhibition exercise for a second time at Berlin’s Aedes Architecture Forum. After Grounded in 2019, the German studio, accustomed to tackling issues of transformation and sustainability in rural spaces, proposes a new exhibition: “Rural Rebellion”. In this exhibition, the studio reinterprets traditional village and landscape structures in unconventional ways, using a wide range of models, panoramic drawings and films, as well as portraits and statements by these “rural rebels”.
More information
Rural, Raymond Depardon
Rennes, Champs Libres – Musée de Bretagne, until January 5, 2025
Since June 15, 2024, the Musée de Bretagne in Les Champs Libres has been presenting an exhibition of some twenty photographs by an important figure in French documentary photography: Raymond Depardon. During the 1990s and 2000s, Depardon, the son of a farmer with a keen interest in the rural world, travelled the length and breadth of rural France with his 6 x 9 camera. The result is a series of black-and-white photographs that tell the story of this rural world, and through it, of “the men and women who inhabited and persisted in cultivating these desolate territories, (…) wise men, philosophers, heroes, in advance of the indispensable degrowth to come”, in the words of the photographer.
More information
Phyllida Barlow. unscripted
Bruton (Great-Britain), Hauser & Wirth Somerset, until January 5, 2025
Ten years ago, the contemporary art gallery Hauser & Wirth opened a new exhibition space in a former farmstead in Bruton (UK). With the aim of connecting with nature and the landscape, Hauser & Wirth Somerset hosts a wide program of art exhibitions, events, learning activities and artists’ residencies. This winter, the featured artist is British sculptor Phyllida Barlow (1944 – 2023). With her transformative approach to sculpture, she is known for her ability to take “ inspiration from her surroundings to create imposing installations that can be at once menacing and playful”. The originality of this exhibition takes up this idea of interaction between the work and its environment as the sculptures both animate and disrupt the landscape, courtyards and garden.
More information
Maintaining Its Spirit: Collection Marlies & Jo Eyck
Limburg hills (Netherlands), Kasteel Wijlre estate, until May 4, 2025
In the heart of the Limburg Hills in the Netherlands, a few kilometers from Maastricht, is situated Kasteel Wijlre, an “estate for contemporary art and nature” which combines contemporary art and architecture with nature. Since this autumn, the institution has partnered with the Bonnefanten Art Museum (Maastricht, Netherlands) to offer visitors an exhibition on the contemporary art private collection of the institution’s founding couple, Marlies & Jo Eyck . The characteristic of the exhibition is that the artworks are presented in the spacial context in which they were originally collected: the estate with its castle and gardens, which was created by the couple to become a “total work of art” (“Gesamtkunstwerk” in dutch). A great opportunity to explore the relationship between art and nature, which plays an important role in some parts of the collection as well as in the site itself.
More information
See also
