Overview:

Take Care: Art and medicine
8 April - 17 July 2022
Kunsthaus Zurich

The exhibition Take Care: Art and medicine explores health as a timeless human preoccupation. Concern with physical well-being in art is as old as art itself. The sensitive body is at once a working tool and object of observation. Taking their cue from works in the Kunsthaus collection, six chapters examine the productive interplay of sickness and pain, medicine, care, and healing through over 300 artworks and objects, over 250 of which are being made available by more than 40 national and international lenders. Early examples date back to the 15th century, while the most recent are works from 2022 produced specially for the exhibition.

The themes covered by this multi-disciplinary exhibition include the ‘golden age’ of medicine, ‘plagues and pandemics’, ‘prophylaxis, complementary medicine and self-healing’, ‘the diagnostic gaze and the hospital system’, ‘pharmaceutics and cutting-edge research’, and finally ‘patients at the crossroads of the normed and singular body’. Familiar names from the past meet emerging artists in their twenties who address the broad spectrum and fascinating evolution of the discourse surrounding the ‘sick’ body.

The exhibition includes 50 artists from the 19th to the 21st centuries, with detours as far back as the 15th century. Two HISTORYNOW paintings and two Chemical Life Support sculptures are included in this exhibition.