Exhibitions

The permanent exhibition at the Architekturzentrum Wien provides insights into the most extensive and comprehensive collection on Austrian architecture of the 20th and 21st centuries. At the centre is the investigation of key exponents, including well-known and less well-known objects. Seven Hot Questions bring Cold Storage to life.

The Architekturzentrum Wien is the only museum in Austria devoted exclusively to architecture. As the Az W Collection has expanded over the last 17 years and consists of over 100 architects’ archives as well as extensive collections of individual projects, a large number of objects are being shown for the first time in the Permanent Exhibition: ‘Hot Questions — Cold Storage’. Selected models, drawings, furniture, fabrics, documents and films develop new threads in seven thematic episodes. Each episode is preceded by one of today’s burning issues, a Hot Question that brings Cold Storage to life.

The nation’s building activity with all of its cultural, social, economic and technical ramifications is made strikingly visible. The contents covered range from the special significance of Red Vienna to architectural pedagogical experiments in the wake of the 1968 movement or architectural revolts in Vorarlberg, to historical and current examples of environmental rethinking. The exhibition also engages with the ideological instrumentalisation of architecture and spatial planning and the active collaboration of architects in authoritarian systems, as well as their resistance. At the same time, the exhibition challenges deficits in the canon of Austrian architectural history, for instance from a perspective of gender equality. New players are featured, light is shed on previously little known sources and the key focus is on multiple perspectives instead of on a national historical narrative. This diversity is also reflected in the exhibition design. The sheer variety of the exponents and their display makes a visit to the exhibition a sensual and an atmospheric experience.

Concept: Angelika Fitz, Monika Platzer
Curator: Monika Platzer
Curatorial Assistance: Sonja Pisarik, Iris Ranzinger, Katrin Stingl
Production: Andreas Kurz
Finances und conversion: Karin Lux
Assistance: Barbara Kapsammer
Exhibition design: tracing spaces / Michael Hieslmair, Michael Zinganel ; seite zwei / Christoph Schörkhuber, Stefanie Wurnitsch

Adolf Krischanitz, Otto Steidle, Herzog & de Meuron: Wohnsiedlung Pilotengasse, Wien 22, 1987–1992, Modell Gesamtanlage Bauteil Krischanitz

Living together with camels and their close relatives shapes cultures. It is a source of livelihood for people around the world and part of their cultural identity. In a special exhibition scheduled to begin in 2024, the Weltmuseum Wien will explore the many aspects of life with dromedaries, Bactrian camels, llamas, and alpacas and will examine the effect that these animals, broadly called camelids, have had on the societies of which they are part.

Featuring films, photographs, artworks, and artefacts from the collections of the Weltmuseum Wien, several of which will be on public view for the first time, and with numerous loans from other institutions, the exhibition in six galleries narrates encounters with camelids past, present, and future.

The exhibition’s thematic arc extends from the first camels, which evolved in North America, how they were domesticated, spread across the world, and are kept today as universal livestock that have contributed to human survival.

The opportunities afforded by the extensive use of products derived from camelids establish a bridge to the present and also point to the future: to address climate change, camelids have emerged as a bearer of hope in medicine, nutrition, and the textile industry.

The United Nations General Assembly has declared 2024 to be the International Year of the Camelid. The Weltmuseum Wien presents the exhibition On the Backs of Camels as part of Austria’s international commitment to the above initiatives.

Super Taus Super Taus and a Camel Yasha 2017 © Photography: Imam Guseinov

Manoel Martins Neto Preparation for body painting (detail) 2018 © Museu de Arte Indígena, Curitiba

On the occasion of its reopening, mumok has invited the artist Jongsuk Yoon to conceive a new mural for the museum lobby. After photo-based installations by Cindy Sherman, Louise Lawler, and Jeff Wall, the most recent artist to create a mural was Siegfried Zaworka, who in his work dealt with the illusionist potentials of painting. Jongsuk Yoon now responds to the challenge of the monumental format with levitating, wholly anti-monumental and anti-heroic landscape pictures. Reduced means and the processuality of painting govern Yoon’s artistic practice, which she has developed in critical reflection of the paradigms of Western Modernism and East Asian traditions—particularly Expressionism, Abstract Expressionism, and Korean sansuhwa (Mountain and Water Paintings). Diaphanous layers of large-scale color patches, processual traces, and graphic ciphers condense to form panoramic “soul landscapes” (J. Yoon), in which “inner” and “outer” perspectives oscillate. 

Kumgangsan is the painterly convergence on a mountain region that Yoon herself has never set foot on: Since 1945, it has been the arbitrary dividing line and visible border between North and South Korea and, as such, is a symbol of an unresolved geopolitical conflict and its still traumatizing aftermath.

Jongsuk Yoon vor dem Wandbild Sun and Moon, Foto: Kalle Sanner © Nordiska Akvarellmuseet Courtesy the artist and Galerie nächst St. Stephan Rosemarie Schwarzwälder, Wien

The exhibition Mapping the 60s is based on the thought that substantial sociopolitical movements of the twenty-first century have their roots in the 1960s. Black Lives Matter and #MeToo, for example, have built on the anti-racist and feminist upheavals of yesteryear—as have current debates on war, mass media and mechanization, consumerism, and capitalism.
The developments of the 1960s in general and the events around 1968 in particular are not only paradigmatic in social and political terms, but also essential with regard to cultural policies. In 1962, the Museum des 20. Jahrhunderts was founded in Vienna, a precursor of mumok, whose collection focuses on Pop Art, Nouveau Réalisme, Fluxus, Viennese Actionism, performance art, Conceptual Art, and Minimal Art—artistic movements of the 1960s. Even when we ask ourselves how to address art history today and make it productive, we encounter discussions that go back to that decade.

Curated by Manuela Ammer, Marianne Dobner, Heike Eipeldauer, Naoko Kaltschmidt, Matthias Michalka, Franz Thalmair

Artists: Arman, Siah Armajani, Richard Artschwager, Evelyne Axell, Jo Baer, John Baldessari, Iain Baxter, Marlène Belilos / André Gazut, Joseph Beuys, Peter Blake, Mel Bochner, Alighiero Boetti, George Brecht, Peter Brüning, Jack Burnham, Michael Buthe, James Lee Byars, Pier Paolo Calzolari, Christo, Chryssa, Jef Cornelis, Robert Cumming, François Dallegret, Hanne Darboven, Walter De Maria, Jan Dibbets, Öyvind Fahlström, Mathilde Flögl, Sam Francis, Karl Gerstner, Alviani Getulio, John Giorno, Domenico Gnoli, Roland Goeschl, Robert Grosvenor, Hans Haacke, Raymond Hains, Sine Hansen, David Hockney, Michael Heizer, Richard Hamilton, Duane Hanson, Jann Haworth, Dick Higgins, Davi Det Hompson, Robert Huot, Robert Indiana, Alain Jacquet, Olga Jančić, Tess Jaray, Alfred Jensen, Jasper Johns, Asger Jorn, Allan Kaprow, Ellsworth Kelly, Corita Kent, Edward Kienholz, Konrad Klapheck, Kiki Kogelnik, Joseph Kosuth, Gary Kuehn, John Lennon, Les Levine, Sol LeWitt, Roy Lichtenstein, Richard Long, Lee Lozano, Mario Merz, Robert Morris, Ronald Nameth, Bruce Nauman, Claes Oldenburg, Jules Olitski, Yoko Ono, Dennis Oppenheim, Panamarenko, Pino Pascali, Walter Pichler, Larry Poons, Mel Ramos, Germaine Richier, Bridget Riley, Jean-Paul Riopelle, James Rosenquist, Teresa Rudowicz, Carolee Schneemann, Karl Schwanzer, George Segal, Richard Serra, Miriam Shapiro, Robert Smithson, K.R.H. Sonderborg, Keith Sonnier, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Paul Thek, Walasse Ting, Günther Uecker, Bram van Velde, Stan Vanderbeek, Frank Lincoln Viner, Franz Erhard Walther, Franz Erhard Walther / Arno Uth, Bernar Venet, Wolf Vostell, Andy Warhol, William Wegman, Lawrence Weiner, Tom Wesselmann, William T. Wiley

Sine Hansen On Top, 1967 130 cm x 120 cm x 2.8 cm Egg tempera on canvas mumok - Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, On loan from the Austrian Ludwig Foundation, since 2021 © Nora Meyer

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!!!!!!

Kunsthalle Wien announces a new annual public art commission for its Museumsquartier building. Nora Turato (b. 1991, Zagreb) will inaugurate the Kunsthalle’s ‘Vitrine’ series with a new 62-metre mural which will remain on view for a year. The work will extend around the south-west wall of the building and be visible to passers-by as they traverse the outer arc of the Museumsquartier.

Turato’s work employs language as its primary material, playfully addressing the power structures at work in its spoken and written forms. Drawing upon a myriad of textual and typographic sources, she appropriates words and phrases, quoting advertising, mass media, SMS and email conversations in paintings on enamel panels and directly on walls. Fragments of text are also collaged to compose longer text-based works published as books or employed as scripts for videos and spoken word performances. T

urato’s new work, will use the length of the Kunsthalle’s Museumsquartier building to illustrate a scream. The artist’s typeface and its controlled application in this meticulously constructed wall painting is set in direct contrast to the text which mimics one of the most primal and uninhibited forms of expression. Unlike the so-called ‘primal scream’, ‘Aaaaaaaaa aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!!!!!!’ refers not to a single, personal trauma but rather to the ‘ongoing incessant news cycle and state of the world with which we are all confronted and where this scream is the only reasonable form of not just release, but expression.’

Biography

Nora Turato (b. 1991, Zagreb) has held solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2022); Secession, Vienna (2021); Centre Pompidou, Paris; The International Centre of Graphic Arts, Ljubljana (both 2020); Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Porto (2019) and Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein (2019). Her work has also been presented within significant international surveys including the Performa Biennial 2023; New York; PostCapital: Art and the Economics of the Digital Age at MUDAM Luxembourg and Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen (2021 and 2022 respectively); INFORMATION (Today), Kunsthalle Basel and Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo (2021 and 2022 respectively); Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art (2022) and the Belgrade Biennale (2021). Turato lives and works in Amsterdam.

Nora Turato, Installation, Kunsthalle Wien, ab 05.09.2024

Aleksandra Domanović’s expansive practice focuses on the intersections of technology, history and culture. Working across sculpture, video, print, photography and digital media, she considers how they shape our understanding of identity and contemporary society. This exhibition brings together different bodies of work made over a period of eighteen years, beginning with an early video that she produced while studying at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. It surveys the development of a playful yet critical oeuvre produced across two decades and shaped by information culture and mass media in the postinternet era. The exhibition includes a series of new and updated works that were specially commissioned for this exhibition. It is the first exhibition of Domanović’s work in Austria and the largest presentation of her work to date.

The exhibition is accompanied by the first monographic publication on Aleksandra Domanović’s work. The book includes an extensive interview between the artist and Michelle Cotton, Artistic Director of Kunsthalle Wien alongside essays by curator Carson Chan, the curator and writer Caitlin Jones, the editor and writer Pablo Larios and the critic and essayist Marcel Štefančič. Published in English and German it will be available from Kunsthalle Wien from October.

Aleksandra Domanović, Ausstellung, Kunsthalle Wien, 05.09.2024–26.01.2025, Ausstellungsansicht: Aleksandra Domanović, Things to Come, 2014, Kunsthalle Wien, 2024, Courtesy die Künstlerin / the artist und / and Tanya Leighton, Berlin und / and Los Angeles, Bubanj Fist Relief, 2012, Courtesy Corporate Collection Switzerland, Kunsthalle Wien, 2024, Foto / Photo: Iris Ranzinger

Whimsical worlds, fantastic creatures, kinetic sculptures: Anne Duk Hee Jordan unfolds a multisensory parcours on the third and fourth floors of KunstHausWien, a museum of Wien Holding, making the unknown and invisible in nature visible. Starting from primordial times, when the first life emerged, the scenery transforms into a magically fluorescent underwater world full of wondrous creatures and diverse phytoplankton. With this exhibition, specially developed for these spaces, the museum – which focuses on the connection between art and ecology – underscores the breadth and depth of this exploration.

“With her immersive, multisensory approach, Anne Duk Hee Jordan offers a new perspective on complex biological interrelationships. The universe created by Duk Hee at KunstHausWien shifts the focus of ecological considerations from humans to the entire ecosystem of our planet, which urgently needs to be protected and preserved. This creates an inspiring bridge from the romanticism of Friedensreich Hundertwasser to contemporary engagement with climate issues,” says Gerlinde Riedl, Director of KunstHausWien.

Anne Duk Hee Jordan designs an artistic universe at KunstHausWien. Here, marine life and oxygen atmosphere meet robotics and symbiosis; in multimedia works, set above and below water, nature is never just a “feel-good oasis,” but a dynamic ecosystem characterized by transience, utilization, fluid sexual identity, and renewal.

The title of Anne Duk Hee Jordan’s first institutional solo exhibition in Austria, The End Is Where We Start From, is taken from the poem Little Gidding by T. S. Eliot.

Anne Duk Hee Jordan, So long and thank you for all the fish, 2023 Courtesy the artist & alexander levy, Berlin © Anne Duk Hee Jordan, Foto: glimworkers

ERWIN WURM

A RETROSPECTIVE ON HIS 70TH BIRTHDAY

Erwin Wurm (b. 1954 Bruck/Mur) is one of today’s most successful and best-known international contemporary artists. For his 70th birthday, this presentation unfolds a firstever comprehensive survey of key works and important stations of his multifaceted oeuvre. Its arc extends from his beginnings in the 1980s to works shown here for the first time or created especially for the occasion. Sculptures, drawings and instructions, videos and photographs invite contemplating the paradoxes and absurdities of our world. In his artistic method, Erwin Wurm examines the concept of the sculptural, introducing it as a measure by which to gauge our contemporary world.

The boundaries between traditional concepts of sculpture, performance, photography or painting are called into question, just as the statics and movement within a work of art are redefined. Wurm overturns habitual perceptions of the reality that surrounds us and, with his artworks, opens up opportunities to raise new perspectives and questions: What happens if I disregard gravity, what if houses start melting away or are squashed by performative interventions? How do bodies and spaces behave when the absurd and paradoxical has room to exist in them? How can you, in the One Minute Sculptures, become part of a work of art for a brief moment, and how does that feel? As the artist himself explains, it is always about the concept of the sculptural in relation to the social. For example, a pickle may well be declared to be a self-portrait, or a lavish luxury convertible like the Fat Car as a symbol of greed, excess, and commodity fetishism in our society. On the other hand, the Narrow House conceptually reflects the narrowness of bourgeois thinking and action and the restrictiveness of social norms, whether through religion, convention, or faux pathos. Relating to this, the show for the first time presents a rural School, which stands for restrictive and now outdated ideas and is another symbol of oppressive and judgmental thought models.

Also in his recent works, Erwin Wurm stays committed to pursuing an innovative take on the sculptural parameters of hull, mass, skin, volume, and time: His new series, Substitutes, Skins, or Flat Sculptures, illustrate how the artist makes a point of rethinking and reshaping the world of existing things, taking us as viewers on a journey of discovery of open territories of thought and art.

Erwin Wurm Psyche (As You Like It), 2024 262 × 115 × 68 cm, Aluminium, Farbe, Kleidung © Erwin Wurm / Bildrecht, Wien 2024 Foto: Markus Gradwohl

100 objects, 100 designers, 25 years, 25 categories, 1 country: The MAK exhibition AUT NOW: 100 × Austrian Design for the 21st Century provides a varied overview of the diversity and innovation in Austrian product design in the new millennium on the basis of 100 design objects. Each of the 25 thematic categories—from A for “Alpine” to Z for “Zeitgeist”—contains four objects that are representative of the wide range of things designed and produced in Austria from the year 2000 to the present day. They are all particularly remarkable examples of Austrian product design—role models for the 21st century. AUT NOW extends an invitation to admire and appreciate the functional, conceptual, and poetic qualities of contemporary design and discover surprising details in familiar things.

“Ideally, contemporary product design should represent a dynamic and holistic approach that revolves around the needs of contemporary society and the environment,” according to MAK Curators Sebastian Hackenschmidt and Marlies Wirth, who developed the exhibition together with Georg Schnitzer and Peter Umgeher, founders of the design studio Vandasye. With their exhibition series Design Everyday held during VIENNA DESIGN WEEK since 2017, Vandasye has regularly turned its attention to Austrian product design, identifying ideas that propose ambitious and inspiring but also sensible solutions to improve everyday life.

The 25 categories define the route through the exhibition, while allowing an indepth response to the question of what characterizes product design today. “Good design” must take into account social challenges and innovative ways of organizing work, as well as new production techniques, distribution channels, and marketing opportunities. Formal, material, typological, and technological criteria play just as much of a role as ergonomics, social and environmental considerations, and the preservation of resources. The emotional content of objects, characterized by “maximum rizz”—wit, creativity, and charisma—is also essential.

Using these categories AUT NOW creates a “school of seeing” on key aspects of product development and the design process that mostly remain invisible to users. The full spectrum of contemporary products is represented in the exhibition—from furniture, domestic appliances, tools, and lighting to accessories and consumer electronics to design for personal care, health, work, mobility, and much more.

From A for “Alpine” to Z for “Zeitgeist”

The categories should be understood as general characteristics of the chosen objects. For instance, “Alpine” subsumes the canon of forms and types that is widespread in the Alps and unmistakable in a wide range of practical objects: a chair, avalanche equipment, and even a bong.

“Material Opportunities” explores the role played by the choice of material and the unexpected possibilities that can arise with the right material—such as unbreakable eyeglass lenses or an edible dog bowl. “Re-Typification” reveals the surprising designs of supposedly unchangeable everyday objects like a ladder or a coat hanger, whereas “Empowerment” contains projects that give their users agency, such as cutlery for children with an age-appropriate design. And the “Invisible” category presents material or functional qualities that remain unseen for the user, in objects like a water bottle or an acoustic panel. Unexpected juxtapositions can be found in almost every category— when it comes to using existing pre-products or intentional Lo-Tek, or when reviewing circular design strategies that make systemic change possible.

With the chosen objects, designers, and manufacturers, the curatorial team sought to represent a range of different approaches, generations, and branches. Self-initiated experiments are presented alongside the production lines of major companies, technological innovations alongside traditional handicraft, and serial products alongside limited editions or pieces that have long been discontinued. Design from the early 2000s is part of the exhibition, as are prototypes that are currently in development, products by established designers and manufacturers, as well as projects by the next generation of designers. Almost a quarter of the exhibits in the show are from the MAK’s own collection; most pieces on display are loans, with the intention to add some of them to the collection on the occasion of the exhibition.

HyperFocal: 0

The exhibition Light Sound Senses explores light as a physical and natural and aesthetically usable phenomenon and aims to stimulate our diverse sensory perceptions. Visitors are invited to engage with multi-sensory works of art to heighten their own awareness of space, time, light, sound, taste and touch. Light is explored as an indicator of technological development and as a cultural construct with symbolic meaning. Through works from the Heidi Horten Collection as well as loans from TBA21 and site-specific and immersive installations – realized exclusively for the exhibition by invited artists – Light Sound Senses conveys a deeper understanding of the nature of light, sound and our five senses.

In the exhibition, which extends over two floors of the museum, visitors will get to know a pioneer of light art, László Moholy-Nagy, or encounter immersive light installations by Olafur Eliasson, Brigitte Kowanz and Siegrun Appelt. Appelt deals with the topic of light pollution and the scientific background of daylight research.

Tracey Emin and Joseph Kosuth use neon as an artistic and conceptual material. A room-filling sound installation by Austrian artist Bernhard Leitner encourages visitors to “see” sound; other artists use sound to achieve a stronger perception of their own bodies. Finally, works by Lena Henke and Ernesto Neto will stimulate the sense of smell and taste.

As a special feature of the exhibition, visitors are encouraged to interact with the works in a participatory way. One example of this is Carsten Nicolai’s work Bausatz noto, in which the visitors themselves act as sound artists: At a table with four record players, different colored vinyls with different timbres can be combined. Carsten Nicolai will create a light and sound installation exclusively for the exhibition.

The exhibition Light Sound Senses is to take a scientific-critical, humorous and artistic-aesthetic look at our sensory perceptions, to challenge them and play with them.

With works by:

Siegrun Appelt, John M Armleder, Cibelle Cavalli Bastos, Olafur Eliasson, Tracey Emin, Cerith Wyn Evans, Dan Flavin, Ceal Floyer, Peter Friedl, Gelatin, Helga Giffiths, Lena Henke, Carsten Höller, Krištof Kintera, Brigitte Kowanz, Joseph Kosuth,  Bernhard Leitner, Paul McCarthy, László Moholy-Nagy, Iván Navarro, Ernesto Neto, Carsten Nicolai, Tim Noble & Sue Webster, Tony Oursler, Finnbogi Petursson, Ugo Rondinone, Christine Schörkhuber, SUPERFLEX, Iv Toshain and Martin Walde.

Curated by:

Julia Hartmann

The subject of friendship is thoroughly existential and timeless, cutting to the bone of human existence. A theme that spans all historical periods and across all regions of the world. At the same time, the subject seems particularly relevant right now: In light of the threatening state of the world, the countless crises, conflicts, and increasing social divisions, Dom Museum Wien’s decision to dedicate this exhibition to a conciliatory interpersonal subject is all the more important.

“In times when polarization in politics, society, and social media as well as rampant egotism on Dom Museum Wien that placed connective elements, the give-and-take of me-and-you, and the dialogical principle front and center”, says museum director Johanna Schwanberg, who curated the exhibition together with co-curator Klaus Speidel. The exhibition title deliberately shies away from purely positive, often idealized connotations of the word “friendship” as the harmony of two souls, to signalize that this is no romanticized “sunshine-and-rainbows” presentation. “In the Spirit of Friendship” also addresses problematic aspects related to this type of relationship.

Friendship is a basic human need: relationships with others, spiritual closeness, and chosen family shape our lives. The exhibition deals with the universal meaning of friendship as part of human social interaction – on a personal or political level. Facets of friendship are explored via graphics, painting, sculpture, photography, video, and installation art. In addition to national and international loans and new commissioned works, the exhibition also offers insights into the collections of Dom Museum Wien.

Like in all preceding special exhibitions at Dom Museum Wien since its reopening in 2017, “In the Spirit of Friendship” doesn’t tell a chronological story but rather uses contrasts and juxtapositions of works from various periods of art history. The sculptures, paintings, drawings, photographs, and video installations span a historical arc from the Middle Ages to the present day. The selection comprises works from the historic holdings of the museum and the Otto Mauer Contemporary Collection as well as high-caliber loans from national and international collections, museums, abbeys, and galleries. The exhibition also incorporates several site-specific commissions and new acquisitions from numerous contemporary artists.

ARGENTINA. Buenos Aires. 1997. Mothers.

Marc Chagall—Lightness in dark times

Marc Chagall’s pictorial world defies the usual order of things. Nothing seems to be in its right place. There is only one constant in his life and work: the memory of his childhood and youth in Vitebsk.

In keeping with his roots in Orthodox Eastern Judaism, Chagall took a stance towards reality and its depiction different from that of his emancipated artist friends in the West. His doubts about visually verifiable reality led him to an original way to overcome the Jewish image ban. For the sake of the poetic representation of reality, he consciously accepts folkloristic simplifications and distortion of protagonists and houses. The people in Chagall’s pictures behave in outlandish ways: they walk through the air, play the violin on the roof. Chagall makes his figures larger or smaller according to their significance, not according to the optical laws of perspective. He piles spaces on top of each other and represents animals as equal to humans. In his late work, Chagall finally sacrificed form and construction altogether to the luster and transparent glow of sheer color.

100 works by the artist from all his creative years show the diversity of an oeuvre that never ceases to amaze. Chagall’s central themes are birth and motherhood, love, the circus, the Bible and death – with ever-recurring motifs: rooster and cow, goat or bull and fish, violinists, rabbis and clowns. Again and again, he reflects on his themes against the backdrop of personal experiences and world political events.

Chagall’s paintings give the impression of a human existence full of joie de vivre and happiness. In fact, it is the conflictful experience of joy and suffering that characterizes this work, cheerful and buoyant as it is, though without leaving out the dark and menacing: love, dance and play in times of persecution and displacement.

For the first time in its history, Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna is dedicating a major special exhibition to Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn (1606–1669). Never before has it been possible to admire such an abundance of major works by the master, one of the most important Dutch Baroque painters, in Austria. The exhibition takes a special approach in contrasting Rembrandt’s paintings with works by his brilliant pupil Samuel van Hoogstraten (1627–1678).

Rembrandt’s workshop was the centre of a lively exchange on artistic challenges: Both Rembrandt and Van Hoogstraten saw themselves as exploratory artists who were always seeking out new ways to depict nature and optical phenomena with deceptive truth to life. Rembrandt’s illusionistic skills also fascinated Van Hoogstraten and would yield a lasting influence on his works.

The exhibited works from different genres bear witness to the competition between the two artists, but also show innovative pictorial inventions which helped Van Hoogstraten celebrate great successes at the court in Vienna.

Moreover, Van Hoogstraten’s Introduction to the Academy of Painting (Inleyding), published in 1678, provides a unique source of information on Rembrandt’s workshop practices, teaching methods and art theoretical opinion.

The exhibition Ins Dunkle schwimmen presents contemporary art that explores the shaping of the individual into a creative subject.  It asks for continuations and deconstructions of the hopes that modernism placed in art as a supposedly authentic expression of inner life and in creativity as a tool for improving living conditions.

Today, self-actualization and self-expression are among the foundational components of entrepreneurial professionalism in much of the world.  “Self-actualization,” or doing the things that make you (figuratively?) burn with passion, is likewise a part of the idealized image of a successful life that is widely disseminated on social media. As coping strategies often present only individualized self-care rather than communal care solutions, and as ecological, social, and political crises escalate, relations of (self-)exploitation take on ever more existential significance.

As “self-designers” par excellence, artists have been the prototypes of the creative existence that has now become a job requirement for all members of society. The exhibition Ins Dunkle schwimmen gathers works of art that deal with these contradictory demands in the context of artistic production, encountering abysses and limits in the process. It features works that inquire into the conditions of the production of the self, explore the relationships between artistic production and work on one’s own life, and search for exit strategies from the instrumentalization of the pathos of creativity and freedom.

Further information on the exhibition:

https://kunstsammlungundarchiv.at/en/collection-art-architecture-design/projects/ins-dunkle-schwimmen-ausstellung/

Exact address: Schönlaterngasse 5, Staircase 8, 1st floor, 1010 Vienna

Franz West, Liège, 1989 © Archiv Franz West, Estate Franz West, Foto: Günter König/Sigmund Freud Privatstiftung

AMOAKO BOAFO – PROPER LOVE

In autumn 2024 the Belvedere is staging Europe’s first museum exhibition on the art of Ghanaian painter Amoako Boafo (born 1984 in Accra). As one of the most important voices from a new generation of Black artists, Boafo portrays his friends, acquaintances, and people from public life, presenting a contemporary image of Black self-empowerment and self-perception.

This exhibition closes, for the time being, a circle in the artist’s biography: After graduating from art college in Accra, Boafo began studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna in 2014. These were years that shaped him as an artist, in which he developed his signature style characterized by his unusual finger-painting technique. Applied to the human body, this creates a sculptural effect that contrasts with the flatness of the rest of the painting. The people portrayed by Boafo embody the idea of Black identity that draws on its own culture, to be understood as an act of resistance against the racist labels of a predominantly white society. This form of Black subjectivity is expressed in the appearance of the sitters, who confront the viewer as self-confident individuals and often seek direct eye contact. Boafo imagined the collage-like garments using textured paper, borrowing from floral and geometric wallpaper patterns as well as referencing Black culture’s historical and political dress codes. The artist’s intensive engagement with Black history is subtly reflected in his paintings that include motifs inspired by literary works by key pioneers of the Black Freedom Movement.

In addition to the exhibition at the Lower Belvedere, Boafo’s works will be integrated in the permanent displays on Vienna 1900 at the Upper Belvedere, showing them in connection with the pictures of key art-historical figures such as Egon Schiele and Gustav Klimt

Amoako Boafo, Enyonam’s Black Shawl, 2020 © Courtesy des Künstlers und Mariane Ibrahim Gallery, Paris © Bildrecht, Wien 2024

Considering the collection

Considering the Collection & An Insert by… is a recently established temporary exhibition format presenting highlights from the Paintings Gallery collection, from Bosch to Rubens, as well as works with links to the Insert, an artistic intervention created by a contemporary artist as a critical statement on the Academy’s historical art collections. The second Insert in the series features Montreal-based Austrian artist Klaus Scherübel.

The exhibition concentrates on the Baroque period, presenting a cross-section of the core of the collection, the bequest of Anton Paula Graf Lamberg-Sprinzenstein from 1822. Other points of focus are the development of representations of space in early modern painting north and south of the Alps, the work of the Renaissance artist Lucas Cranach the Elder, portraits and self- portraits of artists in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and the use of architectural fragments in Baroque painting. These topics refer to Scherübel’s insert, Cranach’s Holy Productivity VOL. 28.

Curated by Claudia Koch and Sabine Folie.

More information at: https://www.akbild.ac.at/de/museum-und-ausstellungen/kunstsammlungen/aktuelles/gemaeldegalerie/ausstellungen/2024/ausstellung-cranachs-klaus 

MOTHS, BATS AND VELVET WORMS! MOTHS, BATS AND HERETICS!

Monster Chetwynd’s first solo museum exhibition in Austria interweaves art, (hi)story, theory, craft, and community into a large-scale work explicitly developed for the house, which will be activated and animated by performers.

Chetwynd’s cross-genre practice, encompassing film, collage, painting, and installation, combines elements of folk theater, pop culture, and surrealist cinema. Chetwynd is known for anarchic bric-àbrac-performances with handmade costumes, props, and sets, often employing simple materials that are easy to use and adapt. The emphasis is on the collaborative process of creating the artwork. Chetwynd describes the artistic work as “impatiently made,” yet draws on carefully researched, diverse cultural references, ranging from Christine de Pizan to Silvia Federici.

BIOGRAPHY

Monster Chetwynd (b. 1973, London), formerly also known as Spartacus Chetwynd and Marvin Gaye Chetwynd, lives and works in Zurich, where ze has been teaching at the Zurich University of the Arts since 2020. Chetwynd was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2012 and exhibits internationally in art institutions and public spaces.

Installation view, Monster Chetwynd, A CAT IS NOT A DOG, Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, 3 March – 29 May 2023 © Monster Chetwynd. Courtesy the Artist and Sadie Coles HQ, London. Photo: Norbert Miguletz / Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt

Based on the architecture of decommissioned nuclear power plants, Imran Channa and Kateryna Lysovenko research the post anthropocene landscape. Human desire and technological development show the consequences on the biosphere, causing devastation and the disappearance of many creatures. Using artificial intelligence, digital software as well as large-scale analogue drawing and painting, Imran Channa and Kateryna Lysovenko create ‘A Fable for Tomorrow’, – a new landscape from which humans have disappeared, but where seeds of new life are emerging.

Imran Channa & Kateryna Lysovenko, A Fable for Tomorrow, philomena+, image by AI