Thursday, 18 December 2025, 5:30 pm

Opening Photo Stories

Museum Tinguely cordially invites you to the opening of Photo Stories 
Curatorial introduction with Batlhasar Waldner, free admission

The permanent collection is being extended to include a section devoted to the Museum’s Picture Archive, highlighting the richness of this resource. Using the example of Tinguely’s work Heureka, the new exhibit shows how broad and varied these historical materials can be – beyond selected individual images.

The Museum Tinguely Picture Archive contains a collection of several thousand items. The collection’s focus on a single artist results in a unique density of photographic material. For the most part, the items are various kinds of photographic prints and film footage from the period 1955–1991, spanning the whole of Tinguely’s artistic career. The high quality of the collection is due above all to the fact that the Museum project was developed from the outset in collaboration with close associates of the artist, who died in 1991. Prominent examples include the artists and former partners Eva Aeppli and Niki de Saint Phalle, his longstanding assistant, the artist Josef Imhof, the art historian and museum director Pontus Hulten, the patron of the arts and collector Paul Sacher, but also photographers like Monique Jacot and Leonardo Bezzola. Since the period leading up to the Museum’s opening in 1996, they and others like them have allowed the collection to acquire many important materials.