Inaugurated in 1879 in the vicinity of the historical centre, the Bern Museum of Fine Arts is housed in a neo-Renaissance building that has been expanded various times. Its roots date back to the State Art Collection in Bern, the oldest and most variegated permanent collection in Switzerland, with was established as early as the beginning of the 19th century. In continuous expansion thanks to bequests and donations, the collection covers eight centuries, from the Gothic to the contemporary, with more than 4 thousand paintings and sculptures, as well as 50 thousand drawings, prints, photographs, videos and films, which the museum also shows through thematic and single-artist exhibitions.

Until 13 February 2022 the Kunstmuseum Bern is hosting, in collaboration with the Menil Collection in Houston and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the first major transatlantic retrospective on Meret Oppenheim, probably the most significant Swiss artist of the 20th century and the most important representative of Surrealism.

Meret Oppenheim. My Exhibition, which presents Oppenheim’s significant works from five decades, reveals her craft as being distinctly more varied. The exhibition encompasses both the artist’s beginnings in the Paris of the 1930s and her further development after the Second World War.

Opening image: the main facade of the building accommodating the Kunstmuseum, built between 1876 and 1878 to a design by Eugen Stettler (1840-1913), chief architect of the city of Bern (photo Kunstmuseum Bern)