A small museum with a very big world inside. Hidden in Geneva’s Old Town, Barbier-Mueller draws on several thousand works spanning Antiquity to the present and representing cultures from across the globe. Displays change regularly, so there is always another part of this remarkable collection to discover.
American artist Rachel Marks presents an original work conceived during a research residency responding to the museum’s collection, notably the Pozzi fonds. The project is research-led and site-specific, articulating a dialogue between archival objects and contemporary practice. Using material inquiry and layered processes, Marks investigates provenance, display conventions and the traces of personal histories embedded in collections. The commissioned piece will enter the museum’s permanent holdings, extending the collection’s narrative through contemporary intervention.
Opening: Thursday 8 October, 18:00
Even if you’re not a watch person, this might change your mind. Around 2,500 watches, automata, precious objects and enamel miniatures chart five centuries of watchmaking, from extraordinary early timepieces to Patek Philippe creations. Geneva craftsmanship at its most meticulous.
Artists Daniel Dewar and Grégory Gicquel present a large-scale installation conceived as a traversable architecture that reconfigures the museum courtyard into a mutable living environment. Seven works dialog with sculpture, and two pieces were created specifically to engage the lapidary collection and the Pierre-aux-Dames megalith. Using carved stone surfaces, constructed siphons and modular plaster and resin elements, the project explores material metamorphosis, bodily presence and the shifting relations between monumentality and domestic scale.
Opening: Thursday 16 July, 18:30
An Imagined World invites visitors into the singular and captivating universe of Mary Shalizi. Created instinctively, Shalizi’s works unfold through vivid colour, intricate patterns and recurring symbols. Figures, animals, architectural forms and imagined beings inhabit compositions that balance memory, imagination and inner experience. The exhibition brings together a selection of works on paper, offering an intimate view of the artist’s personal visual language developed over many years.
Jean-Étienne Liotard’s portraits of the imperial family, notably Marie‑Antoinette, include eleven drawings widely regarded as masterpieces. This project examines the identification of the sitter children and the works’ provenance through a cross-disciplinary investigation. In collaboration with the University of Oxford, the Idiap research institute and the School of Criminal Sciences at the University of Lausanne, historians of art and specialists in the eighteenth century join AI researchers and forensic experts to reveal new insights into authorship and history.
Antoni Tàpies presents the complete series “Variations on a Musical Theme”, twenty lithographs created in 1987. The suite reveals Tàpies’s fascination with the interplay between visual art and music: each variation establishes its own rhythm, material presence and visual language. Treated as a continuous sequence, the works unfold like a musical score, inviting an immersive reading of process, texture and symbolic gesture within the artist’s graphic practice.
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