Medardo Rosso in Kunstmuseum Basel: Illusions of Light, Dialogue with Modernity, and New Horizons for Contemporary Sculpture

article

DATE

04 Aug 2025

AUTHOR

Alexander Burenkov

Medardo Rosso in Kunstmuseum Basel: Illusions of Light, Dialogue with Modernity, and New Horizons for Contemporary Sculpture

AUTHOR

Alexander Burenkov

Long overshadowed by the monumental legacy of Auguste Rodin, the name of Medardo Rosso (1858–1928) is finally reclaiming its place at the forefront of modern sculpture. Though Rodin drew directly from Rosso’s impressionistic vocabulary—most notably in his monument to Balzac—it was Rosso who truly shattered academic conventions. He dissolved the material certainties of sculpture, challenging the ideals of volume, permanence, and frontality by submitting form to the vagaries of light, time, and chance. At the Kunstmuseum Basel, the landmark exhibition "Medardo Rosso: Inventing Modern Sculpture" offers a revelatory encounter with this paradoxical “sculpture without sculpture,” showcasing over fifty bronzes, plasters, and waxes, along with more than two hundred rare photographs and drawings.

Curated by Heike Eipeldauer from Vienna’s mumok (where the exhibition in previous iteration was shown before coming to Switzerland) and Elena Filipovic, who now leads Kunstmuseum Basel, the world’s first public art museum, the exhibition extends beyond a monographic tribute. It is a curatorial constellation, linking Rosso’s spectral experiments with works by over sixty artists—from Degas, Brancusi, and Modigliani to Bruce Nauman, Paul Thek, and Robert Gober. The result is an intergenerational dialogue that illuminates Rosso as a pioneer not only of modernism, but of contemporary practices that question form, permanence, and representation itself.

While Rodin modeled flesh, Rosso modeled light. From his early career, he rejected the academic pursuit of the finished object and poured molten wax over clay models, allowing the material to drip, melt, and veil the contours. These translucent skins caught and scattered light like prisms, transforming mass into atmosphere. Works such as Alms or Gabriella, the Laughing Girl appear less as static objects than as flickers of presence—grainy, momentary, half-formed. Unsurprisingly, contemporaries compared Rosso’s sculptures to early photographs: both capture the ephemeral, oscillating between visibility and disappearance. But photography was more than metaphor. In his Paris studio on Boulevard des Batignolles, Rosso obsessively photographed his sculptures, manipulating exposure, scratching the negatives, and printing with deliberate blurring. “Sculpture exists in the eye, not in the hand,” he declared, displacing touch with vision as the ultimate judge. His photographs of Balzac’s Head and Ecce Puer anticipate cinematic montage, fragmenting the sculptural body into studies of optical instability. In Basel, these ghostly portraits, displayed alongside their original negatives and vintage cameras, suggest that Rosso was not merely documenting his works but reworking the ontology of sculpture through photographic means.

His radicalism extended to technique. Rosso founded his own foundry and refused to edit out casting “errors.” Rough plaster shells, wax splashes, and uncleaned bronze seams were left intentionally, making each work a record of its own becoming. More than forty motifs were cast, reworked, photographed, and returned to—their repetition less about duplication than variability. What Rosso sought was not a final form, but a visual event, a moment of form in flux. In the halls of the Kunstmuseum these heads and busts with “casting errors” really do seem as if they were printed on a 3D printer from modern polymers or unpolished models left over from scanning. Already in 1880s Milan, after his expulsion from the Brera Academy, Rosso proposed a revolutionary scale and scope for sculpture—not for public squares, but for corridors. Rejecting monumentality, he cultivated an intimacy of presence: Flesh of Others, Sick Child, Street Urchin— modest gestures, quiet subjects, fleeting expressions. This smallness, this refusal of grandiosity, set him apart from Rodin and deeply influenced the 20th-century trajectory of non-finito sculpture, from Giacometti to Ursuta.

The exhibition design echoes Rosso’s aesthetics of fragment and frame. In the courtyard of the Hauptbau, Rodin’s Citizens of Calais encounter not another figure but a mirage: against Pamela Rosenkranz’s pink liquid installation (previously shown in the Swiss Pavilion at Venice), Rodin’s bronze appears less solid, more spectral. Inside the Neubau, Rosso’s sculptures are installed on his characteristic gabbie—wooden cage-like pedestals—forcing a single viewing angle, akin to the lens of an old camera. His “chosen frontality” becomes both a conceptual and experiential device. The second floor expands into comparative curatorial dialogues. Henri Rouart is positioned beside Rodin’s Torso, a conversation between oily bronze and porous plaster. A few steps further, Rosso’s Aetas Aurea melts into Senga Nengudi’s stretched nylon, and Eva Hesse’s paper sculptures echo his trembling surfaces. Artists like Jasper Johns, Richard Serra, Kaari Upson, and Nairy Baghramian are framed within thematic clusters—“Process and Performance,” “Repetition and Variation,” “Appearance and Disappearance”—underscoring how Rosso’s fugitivity of form prefigures today’s explorations of anti-form, process, and precarity. Another exhibition section titled “Ungestalt” echoes the eponymous group exhibition curated by Filipovic at Kunsthalle Basel in 2017, centered around the untranslatable German term, which means not exactly formless or amorphous, nevertheless which describes something that struggles against delineation, against clearly defined form; something that both is a form and at the same time undoes that form.

Rosso’s aesthetic radicalism cannot be separated from his social convictions. An anarchist sympathizer, he rejected heroism in favor of overlooked figures: the port laundress, the street child, the flâneur’s shadow. His materials—wax, plaster—are as fragile and short-lived as the human lives he represented. In Basel, a section is dedicated to these “invisible” bodies, with Street Urchin and Kiss Under a Lamppost displayed alongside early 20th-century photo-chroniclers of Paris, making a poignant case for Rosso’s political modernity. One could argue he anticipated Arte Povera, with his unstable, truncated forms made of “poor” materials resisting sculptural orthodoxy and gravity alike. His photographs—nearly half of his 500 known images—become essential to this argument. In a mesmerizing multiscreen projection, the curators replicate Rosso’s own method: a motif flickers across time, light, and focus, allowing the viewer to witness the sculptural event not as an object, but a layered perceptual experience. Rosso’s obsession with image control—signing, editing, and distributing photographs—foreshadows modern practices of self-institutionalization. It was through this medium that his works reached the likes of Zola and Rouart, and through which they now reach us, reframed and reactivated.

What emerges from this labyrinth of light and forms is not just a retrospective, but a rewriting of sculptural history. If modernism’s sculptural turn was from mass to potential, Rosso is its unsung progenitor. He rejected the “cast forever” in favor of the flash of presence. In the age of performativity, process, and fluid identity, his works no longer resemble Belle Époque relics, but prototypes of contemporary thought. His dialogue with post-minimalist, feminist, and conceptual practices needs no curatorial justification—it occurs organically across time. Rosso once said, “Light is the essence of our existence.” Today, light also becomes a critical tool—to question materialism, to unravel power, to unfix identity. The Kunstmuseum’s retrospective reminds us that museums are not mere containers of history, but engines of reactivation. By inserting Rosso between Rodin and Kusama, the exhibition liberates him from the shadow of comparison. He emerges instead as a radiant node in the evolving network of modern and contemporary sculpture. Rosso honed bronze into haze, conjured presence from melt, and embraced disappearance as form. In doing so, he laid the groundwork for a liquid modernity—one that speaks as powerfully to our time as to his own. This retrospective is not just a celebration of a forgotten master; it is an optical seance, a sculptural experiment in impermanence, a necessary recalibration of how form and history come into being.

The exhibition is on view until August 10.

BIOGRAPHY

Alexander Burenkov is an independent curator, cultural producer and writer based in Paris. His work extends beyond traditional curatorial roles and includes organizing exhibitions in unconventional spaces, often emphasizing multidisciplinarity, interest in environmental thinking and post-digital sensibilities, encompassing projects such as Yūgen App (launched at Porto design biennale in 2021), a show in a functioning gym or online exhibition on cloud services and alternative modes of education, ecocriticism and speculative ecofeminist aesthetics. His recent projects include Don't Take It Too Seriously at Temnikova&Kasela gallery (Tallinn, 2025), Ceremony, the main project of the 10th edition of Asia Now art fair (together with Nicolas Bourriaud, Monnaie de Paris, 2024), In the Dust of This Planet (2022) at ART4 Museum; Raw and Cooked (2021), together with Pierre-Christian Brochet at Russian Ethnographic museum, St Petersburg; Re-enchanted (2021) at Voskhod gallery, Basel, and many others.

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