EVENT LANGUAGE: GERMAN

Marc Chagall (1887 – 1985) is one of the most famous artists of the 20th century, whose unique oeuvre with early works from 1905 to the 1980s. Growing up in the small town of Vitebsk (in present-day Belarus) as the child of an Orthodox Jewish Hasidic working-class family, his early childhood experiences would always have a formative influence on the artist.

Chagall’s fantastic, poetic visual worlds fascinate and – familiar as they are to us – always pose new riddles. In terms of style and content, his artistic oeuvre moves between the traditional and the avant-garde. Chagall has lived through the developments of 20th century art from primitivism to cubism, fauvism and surrealism and has created his very own pictorial language. The essential continuity in a simultaneously diverse artistic expression is also unmistakable.
Motherhood and birth, death and love dominate Chagall’s paintings as central themes, which are reflected through repetition and variation over the years and illuminated from a new perspective. Recurring motifs such as the cockerel and donkey, the cow or the fish function as a flexible part of a variable, fantastical cosmos. The apparent contradictions and contrasts in Chagall’s compositions and pictorial worlds show the artist’s search for a ‘logic of the illogical’, through which he adds a psychological dimension to traditional pictorial forms.

The presentation at the ALBERTINA Museum, with around 100 works from all of the artist’s creative phases, focuses on this lively exploration of the most original and universal themes of life, revealing a variety of ‘impossible possibilities’.

The exhibition is a co-operation between the ALBERTINA, Vienna and the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf.curator’s tour of the Heidi Horten Collection

Registration required. FULLY BOOKED.