La roue = c'est tout
Permanent exhibition

8 February 2023 – 2026

According to Tinguely, ‘we live in a wheeled civilisation’. Even today, our lives are shaped largely by the relationship between man and machine and the resulting dependencies that Tinguely deconstructed with such relish. Now, for the first time since the museum was founded, its enlarged collection of Tinguely’s own works is to return to the great hall. There visitors will be able to discover the intricate and poetic early works, the explosive happenings and collaborations of the 1960s, and the musical, monumental and sombre works of Tinguely’s late period, all presented in an entertaining and eventful tour with many opportunities for hands-on participation.

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Fresh Window. The Art of Display & Display of Art

4 December 2024 – 11 May 2025

For decades, there have been close links between the histories of art and shop window display. Besides Jean Tinguely, many other artists have designed pioneering window displays. Conversely, window displays frequently feature as a motif in artworks or serve as a stage for performances and actions. The exhibition will explore this eventful relationship from its beginnings to the present day, while artistic interventions in shop windows in Basel extend the show into public space.

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Julian Charrière. Midnight Zone

11 June – 2 November 2025

 

A core concern of French-Swiss artist Julian Charrière is how the human being inhabits the world, and how it in turn inhabits us. In a comprehensive solo exhibition, Museum Tinguely presents
photographs, sculptures, installations and new film works that deal with our relationship to Earth as a world of water – a liquidity that covers most of our planet with seas, lakes and ice, both habitat for a myriad of organisms and host to circulatory systems critical for the stability of our climate. The exhibition Midnight Zone engages with these underwater ecologies, from the local influential presence of the Rhine to distant oceans, exploring the complexity of water as an elemental medium affected by anthropogenic debilitation. Reflecting upon its flow and materiality, profundity and politics, its both mundane and sacral dimensions, the solo show acts as a kaleidoscope, inviting us to dive deep.

Carl Cheng: Nature Never Loses

3 December 2025 – 10 May 2026
 

Nature Never Loses surveys six decades of the prescient, genre-defying practice of artist Carl Cheng (b. 1942, San Francisco; lives and works in Santa Monica), whose ever-evolving body of work engages with environmental change, the relevance of art institutions to their publics, and the role of technology in society. His inventive lexicon includes photographic sculptures, 'art tools' employed in the production of ephemeral artworks, 'nature machines' that anticipate an artificial world shaped by humans, and extra-institutional interventions intended to reach broad audiences.

Carl Cheng: Nature Never Loses is organized by The Contemporary Austin in partnership with the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia; Bonnefanten, Maastricht; Museum Tinguely, Basel; and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.