Starting with works from the Kunsthaus Zürich collection , the fruitful interplay between illness and pain, medicine, care, and healing is explored in six chapters through 300 works, over 250 of which come from approximately 40 national and international lenders. Some early works date back to the 15th century, while the most recent works were created in 2022 specifically for the exhibition.
The exhibition, arranged in non-chronological order, includes a wide range of expressive means, including drawing, painting and sculpture, but also video, spatial installation and performance. The works focus on physical infirmity: the themes embrace the "golden age" of medicine, "pandemics and prophylaxis", "complementary medicine and self-care", "the diagnostic gaze", the "system hospital and nursing "," medication and research "and finally" people at the crossroads "between the normal body and the atypical body. Illustrious names are combined with young female artists in their twenties to acknowledge the wide spectrum and fascinating evolution of the debate concerning the sick body.
The purpose of the exhibition, conceived and conceived by Cathérine Hug, is not to present art as an illustrator of medicine, but to foster through dialogue the mutual understanding of two systems at the basis of our society. Through its sensory and intuitive interpretation, art can make a fundamental contribution to the understanding of interconnected systems such as body and mind, disease and healing, faith and science. Art and medicine are physically tangible and generate empathy, but they can also lead to significant divergences between those involved.
For a long time medicine was not given the weight that this discipline has today; similarly, even today the importance of art in medicine is not recognized as it perhaps deserves. The Church has long opposed the sciences in general and medical research in particular since the latter, with its own evolutionary approach, questioned the superior divine order. A meticulous selection of exemplary works from the nineteenth century, "the golden age of medicine", with significant collections from the medical collection of the University of Zurich, the graphic collection of the Zurich Polytechnic and the Musée de l'Assistance Publique des Hôpitaux in Paris, highlights several aesthetically compelling milestones, but also aberrations in the history of medicine. Real objects, that is historical specimens not conceived in themselves as art, are approached in an associative dialogue with the works of art. Undoubtedly, the union between art and medicine is particularly evident when the scientist or the healer and the artist converge in a single person, as is the case in the numerous examples from Andrea Vesalio to George Chicotot, from Lotte Luise Volger to Adolf Fleischmann, passing through Martin Kippenberger and Panteha Abareshi.
In the nineteenth century there were substantial advances not only in the sectors of industry, mobility and communication; medicine also reached fundamental goals in antisepsis, anesthesia and consequently in surgery, epidemiology and diagnostics. Hand in hand with technological evolutions, artists began to become more and more interested in the imaging techniques of medicine.
The exhibition was organized in collaboration with the Institut für Evolutionäre Medizin (IEM) of the University of Zurich and with the research group "Rethinking Art History through Disability".
