Image: Kornhausforum
Kornhausforum in Bern will open 'Beat Jost – Schöne neue Welt' with a vernissage on 3 September 2026 at 6.30 pm in the gallery on the second floor. The exhibition runs from 4 September 2026 to 7 February 2027 and presents the work of Bern photographer Beat Jost, described by the institution as one of the city’s defining advertising and commercial photographers.
According to the exhibition text, Jost, who is listed as having lived from 1936 to 2026, worked for a number of major Bern companies, including Warenhaus Loeb, Wander-Ovomaltine, Vidmar, IBA and Pierrot-Friola. His photographs are presented as a broad cross-section of the object and advertising world of the 1960s through the 1980s, a period when commercial imagery shaped catalogues, brochures and advertisements across everyday life.
The Kornhausforum says the exhibition has not previously been presented in Bern in a comprehensive solo show. In the venue’s framing, Jost’s images are not treated only as commercial commissions, but also as carefully composed photo stagings that reflect the social and economic changes of the postwar era. The website describes them as visual records of a time when consumer culture, prosperity, supermarkets, roads, parking lots, suburban expansion and urbanisation were transforming living spaces and lifestyles.
The exhibition text also notes a shift in how the photographs are seen today. Works once encountered mainly as advertising material are now often received as memory images and time capsules, especially as many of the products pictured have disappeared from the market. Kornhausforum presents the show as an opportunity to make these photographic documents accessible to a wider public and to trace what the institution calls a ‘schöne neue Welt’ of postwar Swiss consumption.
The exhibition is curated by Nicolas Kerksieck, with curatorial assistance from Vanda Szabo. The online presentation gives the show’s opening date as 3 September 2026 and its run as 4 September 2026 to 7 February 2027. Opening times listed for the gallery are Tuesday to Friday, 10 am to 7 pm; Saturday, 10 am to 5 pm; Sunday, 11 am to 5 pm; and closed on Mondays.
'Beat Jost – Schöne neue Welt' is one of two exhibitions Kornhausforum says will open on the same evening after the summer break. The other is 'Atlas der Reproduktion – Babys, Grenzen, Geopolitik' in the Stadtsaal on the first floor, while 'Poetics of Deconstruction' remains on view until 15 August 2026. Kornhausforum describes itself as an exhibition and discussion venue for socially relevant topics, and the upcoming season places Jost’s photographs alongside a research-based project on reproductive rights and a separate photographic exhibition by emerging artists.
