Spanning 80 years, a world-acclaimed Swiss collection will be on show at the spectacular Schaulager in Basel.
Maja Hoffmann-Stehlin started the collection with her husband before his untimely death at the age of 36. In his honor and to perpetrate their interest in forward-looking art, she founded the Emanuel Hoffmann foundation in 1933. Maja Sacher, as she later became known when she married orchestra conductor Paul Sacher, was an early collector of works by Paul Klee, Max Ernst and Robert Delaunay that were to become classics of modernism. In the 1960s and 1970s yet unknown artists Joseph Beuys and Bruce Nauman entered the collection. Under the presidency of her granddaughter Maja Oeri, the foundation has enlarged the selection to pioneering art, some of it extravagantly cutting edge.
The exhibition Future Present takes place when Basel’s Fine arts museum, to which the collection was entrusted as a permanent loan in 1946, closes for renovation in 2015. It will be the first extensive presentation in 30 years of the world-renowned collection and will be presented at Schaulager, the venue created by Maja Oeri in memory to her son, Lorenz, who died young.