At Kunstmuseum Basel, Medardo Rosso’s Radical Dismantling of Form

The shapeless, the formless and the undefined took center stage in artistic inquiry in the 20th and 21st Centuries. Paradoxically, what was perhaps the most structured, hyper-regulated and surveilled era of human civilization also gave rise to profound uncertainty—wars and historical traumas undermined long-held truths and value systems. Artists like Michelangelo had already grappled with the concept of the “unfinished” on spiritual and philosophical grounds, but the advent of relativity theory and time-based media pushed modern and contemporary artists to confront a more fluid notion of reality that resists fixed forms, linear narratives and stable definitions.

Within this framework, even the seemingly monolithic concept of sculpture becomes unstable, with matter in constant flux—a turbulence of particles subject to invisible forces, gravity and entropy. “Alarmingly alive,” as artist Phyllida Barlow puts it, the sculpture at the heart of a show of work by Medardo Rosso at Kunstmuseum Basel is never solid or stable in the monumental sense, but inherently open-ended, whether considered formally, perceptibly or emotionally.

Anticipating and at times even surpassing more process-based and performative artistic practices, the work of Medardo Rosso stands as a striking example of sculpture as an unstable pursuit. Though the Italian sculptor remains a lesser-known figure among international audiences, the major exhibition spanning two floors of the Kunstmuseum Basel, timed with Basel, is bringing renewed attention to the pioneering nature of his impressionist approach—an investigation of form as matter in flux that underscores the enduring modernity of his vision.

For Rosso, materiality was everything, even as he sought, at all costs, the undoing of form. His sculptures never fully resolve into a coherent whole, embracing instead the possibility of continual transformation over any notion of finality. In this way, his practice parallels Monet’s Impressionism: fingerprints gather on the nucleus like brushstrokes on a canvas, each one an attempt to crystallize a fleeting instant of human life, where nothing remains fixed. This sensibility is especially palpable in Portinaia (Concierge) (1883–1884) and Madame Noblet (1897), where the “finished” surfaces appear just as raw and elusive as the unmodeled backs of his other works. Malato all’ospedale (Sick Man in Hospital) (1889) takes this dissolution even further.

Rosso worked primarily in wax and plaster—materials traditionally associated with studies and maquettes, but also with death masks and embalmed flesh. His choice deepens the atmosphere of inescapable mortality, decay and transience that pervades his work.

As per the wall text, it wasn’t until the 1960s that formlessness fully emerged both conceptually and aesthetically as a central theme in contemporary art, explored across diverse aesthetic, existential and philosophical registers. Its legacy is evident in the work of Isa Genzken, Yayoi Kusama, Robert Morris, Carol Rama and Alina Szapocznikow.

Staged in finely calibrated dialogue with the artist’s pioneering sculptural inquiry, “Medardo Rosso: Inventing Modern Sculpture” underscores how these artists continuously tested sculpture’s ability to behave like bodies in flux—pliable, potentially abject or ruined and ultimately unstable, always hovering at the edge of disintegration or metamorphosis.

Rosso pushed this paradox of form and formlessness even further through his idiosyncratic semiotics, using photography to capture the ever-shifting nature of his work. His repeated use of imagery became, in the later stages of his career, almost an exorcism of sculpture’s inherent instability—a compulsive effort to pin down what perpetually slips away. From the late 1890s onward, Rosso returned obsessively to a repertoire of roughly forty sculptural subjects, reworking, reshaping and recasting them in new variations—altering surfaces, photographing them, then beginning again.

This suggests an acute awareness of reality in its most essential, magmatic state—something only temporarily solid or stable, always subject to a perpetual cycle of transformation. Rosso’s most reproduced sculpture, Enfant juif (Jewish Boy) from 1893, epitomizes this idea. Though mechanically cast, each version differs subtly in material, color, surface, gaze and even title. The result blurs not only the line between original and copy, but also between life and funerary mask, celebration and memorial, constantly undermining the notion of a singular, intact work of art and its uncompromisable aura.

This tension between singularity and seriality anticipates the later investigations of Andy Warhol and Sherrie Levine. Through their continuous acts of reproduction, imitation and repetition, they exposed the impossibility of exclusivity or uniqueness in the industrial age of mass production—an impulse Rosso had already prefigured.

As noted, Rosso’s art is resolutely anti-monumental—never fixed, never imposing. Radically departing from the European sculptural tradition, Rosso rejected grandeur in favor of impermanence and intimacy: soft, vulnerable and fragile, his works resist the claims of durability and solemnity that define monumentality.

As the exhibition unfolds through historical parallels, it becomes evident that others, too, have explored the fragility of rare moments of beauty. We see it in Edgar Degas’s tender yet vaporous renderings of dancers, in Simone Fattal’s embrace of ceramics’ alchemical unpredictability to shape misshapen contemporary goddesses and in Richard Serra’s precariously balanced steel poles. Each, in their own way, echoes Rosso’s dismantling of monumentality and his undoing of all notions of solidity.

Dissolution was an essential dimension of Rosso’s work. In the sensual and tactile nature of Ecce Puer (Behold the Child) from 1906—the last new motif he created—the face appears ethereal, more a suggestion than a definition, a form in perpetual transience under the artist’s continuous touching and shaping. The boundaries of the figure seem to soften, dissolve and reconfigure with each encounter, resisting any fixed identity or resolution.

In his photographs, the interplay of light and shadow blurs and unsettles the contours of form even further. Figures seem to merge with their surroundings, dissolving into a continuum, as if the sculpted object were merely a fleeting apparition suspended in a shifting field of light. The tension between appearance and disappearance reaches its most radical expression here, pushing sculpture toward immateriality.

“We do not exist! We are only plays of light in space. More air, more light, more space,” declares Medardo Rosso in one of the wall texts, encapsulating his vision of sculpture as inherently and inevitably integrated with its context. For Rosso, form did not exist in isolation; it lived within a continuum of light and space, each element shaping and refracting its final perception and definition.

“We are nothing other than the consequences of the things that surround us,” reads another of his declarations, affirming the fundamentally interrelational nature of all entities. In Rosso’s view, sculpture is not an object, but an event—shifting, relational, perpetually shaped by its environment.

This is also why Rosso placed great importance on the staging of his sculptures, treating display as an integral part of their final composition. Obsessed with capturing the “fleeting moment,” he understood form as meaningless without the perceptual and sensorial conditions in which it is encountered. And yet, within this vision lies an almost desperate attempt to contain the rebellious, entropic nature of matter—an effort to stage and stabilize what fundamentally resists fixity.

At the center of the ground-floor gallery, a selection of sculptures is presented on the historic pedestals Rosso himself favored, including the gabbie (Italian for “cages”)—glass vitrines he used to frame the works. As the exhibition captions explain, Rosso saw these enclosures as a way to define the air and space around the sculpture as part of the work itself, while simultaneously containing its expansive, transformative character within an observable ecosystem of forces and tensions.

This inquiry into form on the verge of disintegration, understood not as collapse, but as a dynamic interplay of energies, has since been revisited and reimagined across generations, mediums and cultural contexts.

The exhibition unfolds through a series of thoughtful juxtapositions that connect Rosso’s radical inquiries with contemporary echoes—among them, David Hammons’s fragile assemblages composed of symbolic found objects rooted in Black culture and experience and Félix González-Torres’s iconic pile of sweets, a perpetually shifting form on the verge of disappearance as visitors take from it and the museum continually replenishes it.

While artists like Serra, Nairy Baghramian, Phyllida Barlow and Lynda Benglis engage with matter’s inherent instability from a more gestural and formal perspective, others—including Miriam Cahn, Marisa Merz, Eva Hesse, Francis Bacon and Francesca Woodman—approach dissolution as an existential condition, one that speaks to the fragile psychology of the contemporary human. Not to be missed are a series of remarkable works by the experimental artist Carol Rama: bricolages of contemporary life, dense with psychological and emotional charge, already embedded in the ectoplasmic, layered fabric of her chosen materials.

For Rosso, even void and empty space become channels through which the restless evolution of form is evoked, propelled by matter’s chaotic, magmatic nature, as if only momentarily congealed into stability. Transience becomes tangible through the breath and openness left within.

Altogether, the exhibition is a compelling exercise in parallels and idiosyncrasies, offering a renewed perspective on Medardo Rosso’s long-overlooked sculptural work. It sharply illuminates how pioneering Rosso’s critical focus on the “act of making” truly was—placing process before final form as he radically redefined traditional notions of sculpture at the close of the 19th Century. At its core, Rosso’s fundamentally processual and event-like approach to creation anticipated a contemporary sensibility toward matter and form—one that remains vital today, as artists continue to question, expand and reimagine what sculpture can be.