Efforts to expand and diversify museum collections are a logical consequence of today’s unconditional calls for equal rights and freedom of expression. The exhibition The Beauty of Diversity presents the rich depth and breadth of the ALBERTINA Museum’s contemporary collections while demonstrating the essential turn toward women and LGBTQIA+ artists, people of color, aboriginal artistic stances, and autodidacts, all of whose works stand out before the contrasting foil of the Old Masters.

Today’s art world is characterized by a deep interest in identity politics and its issues of class, race, and gender. The resulting broad spectrum of artistic, stylistic, and substantive approaches represents a necessary expansion of the historical canon that is represented at the ALBERTINA Museum by artists ranging from Michelangelo and Raphael to Dürer, Rembrandt, and Rubens and on to Goya, Schiele, Picasso, and Warhol.

In its various chapters, this spring exhibition at ALBERTINA MODERN develops an aesthetics of the diverse that upends the ideality of classicist stylistic and formal strivings as well as the conception of the human being as one-dimensional, preferring to instead pursue the beauty of the grotesque, impure, and repressed while lending visibility to that which is marginalized, downcast, and divergent from the norm.

The hybrid mixing and recombination of various systems and genders plays as prominent a role here as does the presentation of the marginalized. The inclusion of artists from Australia, Africa, Asia, and South America is a priority in this exhibition and serves to undermine the exclusive character of eurocentric thought and action as well as western art and culture.

Autodidacts exemplify a pronounced will to do what one must do, proving their authenticity in how they point out art’s internal necessity. Just as, individuals who probe and transcend boundaries not only call to mind art’s role as an anthropological constant but also—through their divergent modes of existence—exemplify nonconformist ways of living and working.