Virginia Jaramillo: Principle of Equivalence
On View February 8, 2025 – June 8, 2025
Fourth-Floor Gallery
Virginia Jaramillo: Principle of Equivalence is the first retrospective devoted to the Mexican American artist’s work. The exhibition traces Jaramillo’s (b. 1939) practice from the mid-1960s to the present, featuring examples of her early work, paintings from her breakthrough Curvilinear series, her handmade paper works, and a selection of recent paintings, which together reveal her enduring engagement with and significant contributions to abstraction. Drawing on her ongoing study of subjects as wide-ranging as physics, the cosmos, archaeology, mythology, and modernist design philosophies, Jaramillo’s work examines the relationship between the earthly and the metaphysical and explores the potential for abstraction to offer alternate ways of understanding our world.
Virginia Jaramillo: Principle of Equivalence is organized by the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Missouri, and curated by Erin Dziedzic, former Director of Curatorial Affairs. The Bechtler’s presentation is organized by Bechtler Curator Katia Zavistovski.
ON SALE
Nothing More Shocking than Joy: Niki de Saint Phalle from the Collection
On View through June 2025
Plaza Gallery
Niki de Saint Phalle (1930–2002) was a visionary French-American artist whose work defies easy categorization. She began her career in the late 1950s, and over the following forty years became widely acclaimed for her vibrant and playfully subversive art practice. In 1964, she began her series of “Nanas” (French slang for “girls”)—life-size sculptures that celebrate the female form and embody Saint Phalle’s assertion that “there is nothing more shocking than joy.” As in Vive moi (Long Live Me) (1968) in the Bechtler Museum’s permanent collection, the Nanas are brightly colored and patterned sculptures of voluptuous, exuberant women that represent female empowerment. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Saint Phalle’s work began increasing in scale, resulting in towering monumental sculptures such as Le grand oiseau de feu sur l’arche (The Large Firebird on the Arch) (1991). Standing over 17 feet tall and adorned with thousands of mirrored tiles, the work is inspired by the Slavic fairytale of the magical firebird, which symbolizes beauty, resilience, and liberation. With its joyfully outspread wings, Saint Phalle’s The Firebird has welcomed visitors to the Bechtler since the museum opened in 2010, and its dazzling presence has become a beloved Charlotte landmark.
This installation showcases works by Saint Phalle from the Bechtler’s permanent collection in honor of the museum’s 15th anniversary.
UPCOMING
Departures and Arrivals: Art and Transnational Exchange
On View April 12, 2025
Second Floor Gallery
Throughout the twentieth century, artists across the globe responded to industrialization and rapid technological growth by rejecting traditional modes of artmaking and developing radically innovative ways to portray the shifting realities of the modern world. Many artists confronted the complexities of their time by embracing abstraction, experimentation, and increasingly expansive possibilities for cross-cultural exchange. The flow of people and ideas across geographical borders was integral in shaping modernism, resulting in dynamic networks of influence that transcended national boundaries and prompted new forms of visual expression. Many artists took advantage of more readily available opportunities to travel, often becoming active members of international art movements and communities. For others, war and persecution forced them into exile, where they made poignant works reflecting political turmoil and personal upheaval.
Drawn from the museum’s permanent collection, this exhibition highlights modern and contemporary artists whose practices were and are indelibly impacted by experiences of migration and transnationalism. Whether freely traversing borders or involuntarily displaced, these artists challenged artistic norms and brought new perspectives to bear on themes of place, belonging, and interconnectedness.
Antoni Tàpies: Matter and Marks
On View April 12, 2025
Third Floor Gallery
This exhibition features a selection of works from the Bechtler Museum’s permanent collection by Antoni Tàpies (1923–2012), a self-taught Spanish artist renowned for his innovative exploration of materiality and symbology. Over the course of his seven-decade-long career, Tàpies made paintings out of nontraditional mediums including dirt, scraps of fabric, marble dust, and straw, creating textured surfaces that evoke a sense of history and touch. His printmaking practice reinforces this tactile, material-driven approach to artmaking. Using techniques such as lithography, etching, aquatint, and embossing, many of his prints echo the coarse surfaces and weathered appearance of his paintings.
Tàpies’s sculptures made later in his career likewise reflect these concerns. In Campana Petita (1990), for instance, the bronze material conveys durability while the bell’s mottled surface and gaping cracks suggest deterioration. As in Campana Petita and the prints on view in this exhibition, the artist frequently incorporated an idiosyncratic vocabulary of signs into his work. Referencing sources as varied as the graffiti he saw on the streets of Barcelona, ancient scripts, and archetypal motifs, these marks underscore the interplay between the physical and the symbolic that pervades Tàpies’s art practice.