THE FANTASTIC LIBRARY. WÜRTH COLLECTION AND LOANS

The Würth Museum presents the exhibition Bibliothèque Fantastique. Würth Collection and Loans from Sunday 6 October 2024 to Sunday 6 April 2025.

Admission is free for all.

Opening times:

Tuesday to Saturday, 10am to 5pm
Sunday, 10am to 6pm

Guided tours on Sunday:

A guided tour in French of the exhibition is offered every Sunday at 2.30pm.

From October 6, 2024 to April 6, 2025, the Musée Würth in Erstein invites you to discover The Fantastic Library.

The exhibition reveals an impressive variety of illustrated books, poems, artists’ books, pop-ups and book-objects, in dialogue with paintings, lithographs and sculptures. Like a fantastic and playful library, it highlights the inspiring work of some forty artists and authors who have each explored and reinvented the book as an everyday object, elevating it to the status of a work of art. The tour begins with works that combine painting and writing, text and image, by fi gures such as Anselm Kiefer and A.R. Penck. Other artists, such as Susanne Egle and Günter Grass, explore the medium of the book, using materials as varied as stoneware, terracotta, lead and cardboard to create unique book objects. In an age of digitalization and dematerialization, these creations highlight the form and materiality of the book. The exhibition continues with an exceptional collection of artists’ books. Emerging in the 1960s with the Fluxus and CoBrA movements, this singular form of expression has appealed to many artists, breaking down the boundaries between visual art and literature. Painted or illustrated, with or without text, produced alone or in collaboration, in small or large formats, unique or massproduced, artists’ books diff er from traditional bibliophilic editions, and are embodied here in works by artists such as Jean (Hans) Arp, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Pierre Alechinsky and Andy Warhol. The Fantastic Library is also about illustration, with original works by Tomi Ungerer and Mexican artist Francisco Toledo, which will delight the youngest visitors and awaken the schoolchildren’s memories of others.

List of artists in the exhibition :

Pierre Alechinsky, Horst Antes, Karel Appel, Jean (Hans) Arp, André Breton, Michel Butor, Anthony Caro, Eduardo Chillida, corneille, Salvador Dali, robert Desnos, Susanne Egle, Paul Éluard, Hans Magnus, Enzensberger, Max Ernst, Sam Francis, Günter Grass, Jacques Herold, Jenny Holzer, Patrick Hughes, Asger Jorn, Anselm Kiefer, Alfred Manessier, Joyce Mansour, André Masson, Georges Mathieu, Roberto Matta, Eduardo Paolozzi, A.R. Penck, Jacques Prévert, Dieter Roth, Jean-Paul Sartre, Ben Shahn, Hans Staudacher, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Francisco Toledo, Günther Uecker, Tomi Ungerer, Herman de Vries, Andy Warhol.