On the occasion of the 130th anniversary of Austrian-Korean diplomatic relations, Weltmuseum Wien, in collaboration with outstanding Korean artists who created these works in recent years, is showing the exhibition 책거리 Chaekgeori – Our shelves Our selves in three gallery rooms.

In Korea, chaekgeori (Korean: 책거리, translation “books and things”) designates a painted arrangement of books, shelves, various objects, and small treasures. This kind of painting has its origins in the Chinese tradition of collecting things such as the writings of Confucius, scrolls adorned with calligraphy or paintings, ancient ritual vessels, and decorative objects – and in the high esteem accorded them. Also beloved among Chinese collectors were depictions of flowers and animals, such as butterflies, mandarin ducks, carp, cranes, deer, as well as lotus blossoms, peonies, chrysanthemums, peaches, pomegranates, melons, and the citron, Citrus medicus, also known as ‘Buddha’s hand’. These motifs express positive wishes for health, happiness, wealth, and freedom from want. But their depictions are also often playful, inviting their viewers to seek and identify them in the paintings.

Book on Book 책속의 책, LEE Hwa Young 이화영 , 2021 © LEE Hwa Young 이화영

Towards the end of the 19th century, the techniques of photographic art reproduction were perfected and photography from paintings developed as a new line of business. In this context, the imperial painting collection also aroused international interest. The impending transfer of the collection from Belvedere Palace to the newly built Museum am Ring was seized as an opportunity to have the Old Master paintings systematically photographed for the first time. The difficulty was to reproduce the colourfulness of the paintings in black and white photographs.

War in Heaven, Creation of Eve, Fall and Expulsion

How did it come about that we don’t work to live but rather live to work, and that we can scarcely imagine other forms of living? Taking inspiration from the famous Marienthal Study, In the meantime, midday comes around revolves around questions like these. The international group exhibition looks at the changes to the field of work in the last decades, made more visible by the Covid-19 pandemic, and considers the modalities of collective action and political imagination such global events carry to affect work.

To approach this set of issues, the artworks in the exhibition oscillate between several thematic zones: crisis and social collapse, alongside both historical and contemporary forms of workers’ collective action and organization, are discussed by Lamin Fofana, Adelita Husni-Bey, Problem Collective, and Bassem Saad. Arts of the Working Class and bare minimum collective deal with other ways of being together, such as social bonds and practices that challenge the centrality of labor and reclaim time as the foundation of freedom, while Vina Yun in collaboration with Tine Fetz, Moshtari Hilal, Sunanda Mesquita & Patu and Ausländer consider labor migration and its prospective planetary character. Moreover, the exhibition also takes a look at the specific conditions of artistic work and praxis — through the presentation of works by the late artist Linda Bilda (who died in 2019), and Eva Egermann’s take on them.

Artists: Arts of the Working Class • AUSLÄNDER with the invited guests HORIZONT Kollektiv • bare minimum collective • Linda Bilda • Eva Egermann • Lamin Fofana • Adelita Husni-Bey • Problem Collective • Bassem Saad • Vina Yun in collaboration with Tine Fetz, Moshtari Hilal, Sunanda Mesquita, and Patu • …

Adelita Husni-Bey, On Necessary Work, Videostill, 2022, Courtesy the artist

The exhibition mixed up with others before we even begin investigates models of thinking and working that reconcile different, sometimes contradictory entities within contemporary visual culture. Current artistic positions enter into a dialogue with selected works from the mumok collection and objects from the collections of the Natural History Museum Vienna to foreground the hybrid as an effective tenet, not only in artistic but also societal and political realms.

mixed up with others before we even begin celebrates the historical-cultural processes of creolization as a mode of world-making that has always been there. It encompasses moments of encounter and friendly gathering as well as those of collision, too. The exhibition features works that open perspectives to postcolonial histories of diversity, to satirical transliteration, queer folklore, and collective feminist rituals, to the molecular borders of the human body and its entanglements with science and technology.

Artists: Leilah Babirye, Mariana Castillo Deball, Anetta Mona Chişa & Lucia Tkáčová, Nilbar Güreş, Nicolás Lamas, Slavs and Tatars

Nilbar Güreş: Contaminated Pina Colada, 2021. Oil on canvas, 50 × 40 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Martin Janda, Vienna

The exhibition mixed up with others before we even begin investigates models of thinking and working that reconcile different, sometimes contradictory entities within contemporary visual culture. Current artistic positions enter into a dialogue with selected works from the mumok collection and objects from the collections of the Natural History Museum Vienna to foreground the hybrid as an effective tenet, not only in artistic but also societal and political realms.

mixed up with others before we even begin celebrates the historical-cultural processes of creolization as a mode of world-making that has always been there. It encompasses moments of encounter and friendly gathering as well as those of collision, too. The exhibition features works that open perspectives to postcolonial histories of diversity, to satirical transliteration, queer folklore, and collective feminist rituals, to the molecular borders of the human body and its entanglements with science and technology.

Artists: Leilah Babirye, Mariana Castillo Deball, Anetta Mona Chişa & Lucia Tkáčová, Nilbar Güreş, Nicolás Lamas, Slavs and Tatars

Lamas Nicolas, Posthuman Portrait Coral, 2021

Which Side Are You On? brings together a selection of works from over twenty years of Rajkamal Kahlon’s practice, as well as several new commissions created for the exhibition at Kunsthalle Wien.

In her work, Kahlon explores the interrelatedness of power and visual regimes by looking into narratives that are seen as scientific and objective, and at the same time are deeply influential in forming the collective imagination and the way we see and interpret things around us.

As the title of the show, the phrase Which Side Are You On? invites visitors to examine their consent to, even reiteration of, the violent process of “Othering”, through which the superiority of an imagined “we” is created by attributing traits of inferiority to people constructed as “others”. Through the defiant gaze of their protagonists, Kahlon’s paintings address the viewer directly: how are you implicated in this violence and injustice surrounding you?

Installation view: Rajkamal Kahlon. Which Side Are You On?, Kunsthalle Wien 2022, photo: www.kunst-dokumentation.com

Since time immemorial, fests have challenged people to engage in activist experiments or to make artistic statements. Sometimes even a glass of champagne or a forbidden costume, an immersive party sound or a festive production can trigger surprises and even provocations. The fest as an ephemeral event has repeatedly prompted designers from the fields of art, architecture, design, and music, to translate design traditions and art discourse into the excesses of a wild night or into the celebration of a worthy occasion. Conversely, these transient freedoms have stimulated and tested new formats and content. Fests document social urgencies and, in the process, changes—both large and small. The MAK exhibition THE FEST: Between Representation and Revolt brings cultural and social history to life and addresses the significance of design strategies for everyday culture.

Thematically, there are hardly any limits to what can be celebrated: Celebrations are held for religious and political reasons, (wild) artists’ and other festivities sometimes transgress taboos, private celebrations reflect social contexts. Temporally, the exhibition spans an arc from the beginning of the Enlightenment to new festive calendars of a forming working class at the time of industrialization to current festive formats. Whether bold rococo masked balls, festivals of avant-garde from the interwar and post-war periods or forbidden raves: All of them are recalled, discussed, and celebrated with their subversive power in THE FEST.

MAK exhibition view, 2022, THE FEST © Markus Krottendorfer/MAK

The title “réflexion” refers to processes of reflection, reaction, maturation, change and transformation. Familiar forms and structures from nature and the everyday environment are questioned about their regularities and placed in a new context.

Form, texture and colour play a central role. Characteristic of the wall objects and sculptures shown is their haptic presence and the associated sensual experience, the feeling and grasping of surfaces, materials and forms.

Judith P. Fischer shows sculptures, wall objects, drawings and room installations.

Judith P. Fischer „CURVE“, 2021 © Petra Rainer/Bildrecht

The ALBERTINA presents a retrospective of the history of printmaking over a period of six centuries, from Albrecht Dürer and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec to Kiki Smith and Damien Hirst. The two exhibitions planned as a pas de deux – at both ALBERTINA locations – span from works of the late Middle Ages to the prints of contemporary art. The two exhibitions are joined by a third, as it were, dedicated solely to the most important printmaker of the 20th century: Picasso.

The first exhibit, Dürer. Munch. Miró – The Great Masters of Printmaking will open at the ALBERTINA at the end of January. It presents outstanding works of the so-called ‘Old Masters’ – including Albrecht Dürer, Pieter Bruegel, Rembrandt van Rijn – and leads up to the impressive works of modern and contemporary art.

Joan Miró | Ohne Titel, 1974 | ALBERTINA, Wien | © Successió Miró / Bildrecht, Wien 2023

(c) Jacob Friis-Holm Nielsen

With the exhibition FALTEN (German for folds or wrinkles), the MAK Asia Collection deciphers the complexity of the phenomenon of Falten with regard to technical, creative, physical, symbolic, and cultural dimensions. The transmedially conceived show illuminates Falten in multiple perspectives from the viewpoints of the history of design, culture, and ideas as well as cultural anthropology. Starting from a comprehensive concept, Falten are presented not only in the form of fabric designs and as a design method. They are also discussed as cultural practices and as a topos of aesthetic distinction in order to show their broad facets as a cultural technique and their philosophical-symbolic dimensions. A wide range of objects can be seen: from textiles and works on paper to furniture and paintings. The transregional exhibits are partly from the MAK collection and are supplemented by loans.

© FURUKAWA Aika

100 works from the Klewan Collection by more than 50 artists and numerous writings highlight the tense relationship between Surrealism and psychoanalysis. Berggasse 19 in Vienna serves as a pivotal point of this relationship: for André Breton and Salvador Dalí, the origin of psychoanalysis represented a place of longing. Commonalities and differences between Surrealist and psychoanalytical views become visible in the exhibition as well as the manifold references of the artistic avant-garde to Freud’s science of the unconscious – with works by Herbert Bayer, Hans Bellmer, Victor Brauner, Salvador Dalí, Giorgio de Chirico, Max Ernst, Conroy Maddox, André Masson, Meret Oppenheim, Pablo Picasso, Alberto Savinio, Toyen (Marie Čermínová) and Dorothea Tanning, among others.

“SURREAL! Imagining New Realities” explores the influences of psychoanalysis on surrealism, which made use of its theories on drives, dreams, displacements, and condensations in so many different ways, sometimes also by means of productive misunderstandings.

Herbert Bayer, The Lonely Metropolitan, 1973 (1936) © Bildrecht, Wien 2022

The comprehensive show at the Lower Belvedere highlights the impact of significant Western European artists on Gustav Klimt’s work. Carefully chosen comparisons of his paintings with works of art that had a verifiable influence on him create an exciting dialogue, with works by Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh, and Jan Toorop, as well as Claude Monet, Auguste Rodin, Vincent van Gogh, and Henri Matisse. In what ways did they inspire Klimt? How did he translate these influences into his own visual language?

Gustav Klimt, Water Serpents II, 1904/1906–07. Private collection, courtesy of HomeArt

The exhibition series “NITSCH a homage by …” presents works by inspiring figures and former companions as well as by artists whose development was decisively influenced by Hermann Nitsch and his total work of art.

Parallels and overlapping aspects in their works bring to light new relationships and interconnections between the respective artistic processes. Each exhibition focuses on an individual and personal facet that will enable visitors to learn more about Nitsch’s oeuvre and appreciate its ongoing influence.

PAUL RENNER

SEEING, SMELLING & SQUEEZING

“For years I’ve been interested in painting that aims to create an intensive sensual experience. Form focuses perception on the materials represented. The mediums of the composition are food, plants, juices, and seeds, which are mixed with resin, wax, and paint. An herbarium emerges that dispenses with logic and scientific stringency as we understand it today.” – Paul Renner

Paul Renner’s idea of art demands a form of staging that goes beyond painting a picture. The act and resultant form of compressing has preoccupied Renner from the outset – pressed must, mashed cabbage, slabs of bacon squashed between stone slabs, berries boiled into mush, centrifuged honey, squashed fruits squidging out between fingers and toes, meat pounded, smoked, pressed. In Renner’s vision, this compressing and compacting involves the decomposition of our existence: “Existence is squashed, crushed, solidified, fermented, and decomposes into an invisible vapor. The sparkling elderberry wine explodes in the cellar. The mycelium fungus crawls up the walls. I imagine that I’m on the other side. Existence is permanent decomposing.”

Specially for this exhibition Renner is showing his new cycle “looking, smelling & squeezing”. Taking center stage is the monumental painting “the honey wall” – composed of damar resin covered in goldleaf, inserted with molded nests out of branches and twigs, honeycombs, seeds, fruits, rinds, juices, and plants.

Detail aus Honigwand © PaulRenner

Christine Sun Kim’s art brims with rhythm and dynamic energy. Small-format drawings and sprawling murals, internet memes, text messages in public spaces, and banners towed across the sky by airplanes pack a punch and seem to want to explode the confines and constraints of their media. Her drawings are graphical and spare and largely fall into one of two categories: one utilizes the aesthetics of infographics, while the other adopts the formal repertoire of comic strips, notably speed lines to convey action and reaction.

Language, sound, body, identity and diaspora, translation, hierarchization, principles of exclusion, and societal norms: these are some of the vital concerns to which the artist dedicates herself in her formally diverse output. Many of her works share with the audience how it feels to be structurally and systematically excluded from the hearing majority community; to be forever subject to the rules of others and have to fight for opportunities that are available by default to the hearing. Kim’s art is unmistakably political, at its core demanding greater visibility for Deaf people and wider recognition of disability access writ large.

Christine Sun Kim, Alphabet From the Speller's Point of View, 2019, Courtesy the artist and François Ghebaly Gallery, photo: Peter Harris Studio

In Kirawa, her first solo exhibition at an Austrian institution, Kresiah Mukwazhi presents a new body of work consisting of textile paintings and video works. Her mixed-media collages, sculptures, videos, and performances are informed by her personal experiences and observations of gender-based violence, exploitation and abuse in her native Zimbabwe. In vibrant textile works, female figures perform seemingly vulgar and obscene gestures, hinting at the artist’s inquiries into the arduous working and living conditions of female sex workers in Zimbabwe’s patriarchal society. Against this backdrop of precarization and marginalization, Mukwazhi uses her powerful work as a form of visual activism, scrupulously carving out forms of resistance and self-empowerment. Mutual support and encouragement, together with humour as a weapon and means of resistance, are recurring themes in her work.

Kresiah Mukwazhi, Rakazvirova rikazhamba (it (the cock) hit itself and it cried), 2023, video still

New York-based artist Jordan Strafer’s primary medium is video. Her part-autobiographical, part-fictitious work reflects the complex nature of racial identity, gender, sexuality, class, and ‘Americanism.’ A key aspect of her practice is the thoughtful yet playful choreography of seemingly antagonistic emotions—both comical and tragic, intimate and factual, familiar and unfamiliar, repulsive and appealing situations appear in an unusually fluid manner. Drawing from true stories, she makes visible that realities are rarely dualistic.

Jordan Strafer, LOOPHOLE, installation view, Secession 2023, photo: Oliver Ottenschläger.

With the exhibition ON THE ROAD AGAIN, 24 contemporary art projects from Austria, conceived and realised for 23 cities around the world, come together for a joint final presentation in Vienna. The eponymous project spanned a period of three years – call for proposals and selection in 2021, project implementation in 2022, group exhibition in 2023.

The idea was to use the Austrian cultural network abroad and its resources for a post-Covid initiative to encourage artists to create new projects around the world. On the Road Again was to be the first joint call for proposals by the Austrian Cultural Forums for artists from the fields of visual arts and media art. The search was on for concepts for new artistic works or site-specific installations that deal with the theme of the call and the respective host country. site-specific installations for the Austrian Cultural Forums in the following cities: Arad (Cultural Forum Tel Aviv), Belgrade, Berlin, Bratislava, Budapest, Bucharest, Instanbul, Kyiv, Krakow, Ljubljana, London, Mexico City, New York, Prague, Rome, San Francisco, Sarajevo, Tehran, Tianjin (Cultural Forum Beijing), Tokyo, Warsaw, Washington, Zagreb.

(c) Ramesch Daha

With the exhibition ON THE ROAD AGAIN, 24 contemporary art projects from Austria, conceived and realised for 23 cities around the world, come together for a joint final presentation in Vienna. The eponymous project spanned a period of three years – call for proposals and selection in 2021, project implementation in 2022, group exhibition in 2023.

The idea was to use the Austrian cultural network abroad and its resources for a post-Covid initiative to encourage artists to create new projects around the world. On the Road Again was to be the first joint call for proposals by the Austrian Cultural Forums for artists from the fields of visual arts and media art. The search was on for concepts for new artistic works or site-specific installations that deal with the theme of the call and the respective host country. site-specific installations for the Austrian Cultural Forums in the following cities: Arad (Cultural Forum Tel Aviv), Belgrade, Berlin, Bratislava, Budapest, Bucharest, Instanbul, Kyiv, Krakow, Ljubljana, London, Mexico City, New York, Prague, Rome, San Francisco, Sarajevo, Tehran, Tianjin (Cultural Forum Beijing), Tokyo, Warsaw, Washington, Zagreb.

Upheaval in society and ecology – artists confront realities that affect us all worldwide: this was the overarching theme of the exhibition. Our society is in upheaval, as is the economic and political environment in which we live. With the Russian attack on Ukraine, war is back in Europe. And it is the world itself that is changing, not least through the careless actions of man. The aim was to address the broadest possible spectrum of contemporary Austrian artistic creation, beyond age limits, beyond the question of citizenship. The participating artists should only have their centre of life and work in Austria.

Olaf Osten

With LandRush, the two document the social and ecological consequences of global agriculture. They work with farmers, fishermen, scientists, indigenous farmers and activists to explore issues such as seed, water and land rights, environmental justice, climate change and the future of agriculture worldwide. Both global contexts and individual approaches are highlighted. Frauke Huber and Uwe H. Martin use artistic, journalistic and scientific strategies to make the different realities of life intellectually and emotionally tangible. Their many years of research and recordings have resulted in publications, interactive apps, and the atmospherically and content-wise impressive spatial multi-channel installations that are presented in the MQ Freiraum.

Curated by Verena Kaspar-Eisert, Chief Curator MQ Vienna

LandRush, TheRoad, Brasilien 2012 © Frauke Huber & Uwe H. Martin, Bildrecht Wien 2023

In keeping with international developments and tendencies in the art world, the ALBERTINA Museum’s collection of printed graphics reflects important post-1945 phenomena in light of outstanding examples. American pop and minimal art are present in the form of works by Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein and Agnes Martin, while Germany’s artists are represented comprehensively by Georg Baselitz, Jörg Immendorff, Anselm Kiefer, and others.

The selection here also encompasses art by more recent figures, with contemporary approaches to traditional techniques such as woodcut featured alongside innovative works that exploit creative possibilities offered by new printing technologies.

This exhibition presents around 100 key works of post-1945 art history, some of them in large formats, that simultaneously embody principal elements of the ALBERTINA Museum’s present day collection.

Andy Warhol | Electric Chair, 1971 | screen print | 89,9 x 121,6 cm | Donation of der Gesellschaft der Freunde der bildenden Künste

Kunsthistorisches Museum invited Georg Baselitz (b.1938) to take part in an exhibition project that has the artist enter into a visual dialogue with the Old Masters. He selected the works himself – seventy-five of his own creations and forty from the Picture Gallery of the Kunsthistorisches Museum –, concentrating entirely on the nude, the naked figure. The exhibition casts a light on this elementary human condition, which has always been a central topic of European art.

Georg Baselitz, Fingermalerei – Akt, 1972, Öl auf Leinwand, 250 × 180 cm. Privatbesitz © Georg Baselitz 2023, Foto: Jochen Littkemann, Berlin

In recent years, following his large-scale research on Melchior d’Hondecoeter for his 2010 exhibition Intolerance at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, Willem de Rooij has turned his attention to d’Hondecoeters’ cousin Jan Weenix and to the relations they had with their pupil Dirk Valkenburg. De Rooij’s researches always look at historical phenomena from a post-colonial perspective and at classism-related information that is transmitted through images. Likewise significant are allegorical allusions, formal techniques and practices, and parameters on the basis of which we look at and interpret works against the background of present-day discourse: the issues discussed include the original, the copy, certain ‘formulas’ and iteration techniques, and the conditions governing the exhibiting and loaning/travelling of artworks /commodities and living ‘material’ in a globalized world. In the installation King Vulture of 2022, de Rooij took up several of these elements. One was the decision, prompted by certain conditions resulting from the operation of the museum, to have the photographic reproductions of the paintings, marked with visible colour cards, copied by Yaohui Zhu and the team of the Yunxi Art Studio, Dafen (China). At the Paintings Gallery, this thread is picked up in the artist’s selection of works by Jan Weenix, Melchior d’Hondecoeter and Dirk Valkenburg from the Academy holdings and other Viennese collections, which he puts into a specific spatial constellation.

© Paintings Gallery of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna

Just how sustainable is the ‘eternal moment’? To what extent does the production of photographs contribute to man-made climate change? MINING PHOTOGRAPHY. The Ecological Footprint of Image Production looks at the history of the key raw materials involved in photography: how they are mined originally, how they are disposed of, and the impact on our environment. A history of materials in five acts!

The exhibition MINING PHOTOGRAPHY tracks down individual trade and production chains. How has the actual materiality of photographs, frequently invisible to the naked eye, changed over the decades? The five exhibition sections follow the trail of the materials used in photographic production: the copper for daguerreotypes; the fossil fuels such as coal and bitumen for printing processes; the silver for the silver gelatin prints in widespread use in the 20th century; the paper as a backing material; and the rare earths for the ever more compact cameras and smartphones. Interviews with M. Susan Barger (restorer), Hans Joosten (biologist), Hannah Pilgrim (activist), Rainer Redmann (chemist), Katrin Westner (mineralogist) and Katherine Mintie (art historian) examine the ecological footprint of materials and their extraction from a variety of perspectives in both research and science.

Lake Bed, Developing Process, 2013.

Etel Adnan, Manifeste pour la Fin de l'Être de Akl Awi, 2017, Courtesy Saradar Collection Beirut

Yasmeen Lari is Pakistan’s first woman architect. She designed iconic modernist buildings before initiating a zero-carbon self-build movement for the poorest of the poor. This exhibition uses Lari’s oeuvre as an example to show how the relationship of architecture to the future has changed.

Self-built, zero carbon, and flood-resistant houses, Sindh Province, Pakistan; tens of thousands have already been implemented. ©Archive Yasmeen Lari

Yasmeen Lari is Pakistan’s first woman architect. She designed iconic modernist buildings before initiating a zero-carbon self-build movement for climate refugees and the landless. This exhibition uses Lari’s oeuvre as an example to show how the relationship of architecture to the future has changed.

Yasmeen Laris Zero-Carbon-Architektur: flutresistente Häuser in Selbstbauweise in Sindh, Pakistan, seit 2010 © Foto: Archiv Yasmeen Lari

The exhibition ON STAGE explores the various theatrical and stage-related forms of expression in art since the 1960s, when a neo-avant-garde critical of tradition began focusing on performative and actionist art forms that endowed artists with a stage-like presence, often in front of an audience. The Viennese Actionism with its provocative and time-critical theatricality is just as much a part of this as the Vienna Group, whose literary cabaret stands firmly in the tradition of Dadaist theater, or the Fluxus-Movement with its media crossovers. Alongside these maledominated art forms, a feminist scene established itself that portrayed and challenged the effects of patriarchal social hierarchies on gender roles. They form the historical basis for more recent positions that oppose conservatively determined gender roles and images of identity, as well as racism and colonialism. Other thematic areas include musical and cinematic productions, (self-)representations and rituals of the art business as well as works in which viewers become actors. The exhibition shows 150 works and work series, most of which are culled from the holdings of the mumok collection.

Cindy Sherman, Untitled

Exactly half a century after his passing, the ALBERTINA Museum is commemorating the life and works of Pablo Picasso, that greatest and most influential artist of the 20th century—a pioneer of its first half with cubism, a central protagonist of symbolism during his Blue Period, a forerunner of the 1920s’ neoclassicist tendencies, and in his late works an ideal to be emulated by the neoexpressionist movements of the 1980s. His oeuvre, encompassing approximately 50,000 works, reflects the momentous political transformations and dynamic avant-garde movements of his era, which stretched from the dawn of the 20th century into the early 1970s.

The ALBERTINA Museum holds central works from all of the important phases of Picasso’s career: from the Blue Period painting The Sleepy Drinker of 1902 to masterpieces created amidst the Second World War and its aftermath and on to late works such as Naked Woman with Bird and Flute Player or his late graphic prints, which bear witness to his grappling with life’s ephemerality and “painting against time.” This exhibition shows 18 paintings from the Museum’s own collection and a total of over 70 works by a man who, even during his own lifetime, had become the archetype of the modern artist

Pablo Picasso, Mittelmeerlandschaft, 1952, Albertina Wien (c) Succession Picasso / Bildrecht Vienna

Dániel Bernáth, born in 1990, is one of Hungary’s young generation of painters. He deals with the material and artistic aspects of the pictorial object and moves on the border between meticulous planning and emotional spontaneity. In his series “Y”, which is also the title of his solo exhibition at STRABAG Artlounge, the focus is on the “Y” not as a character but as a pictorial sign. In nature, forms become more complex as they grow and divide. An opposite development is reflected in the artist’s working method; he creates his compositions by splitting the whole.
The picture supports are industrially manufactured plywood panels that preserve the longitudinal sections of tree rings and thus bring the dimension of time into the picture. The depiction of time in nature, the rapid production of a plywood panel and the claim of a work of art to eternity meet in Bernáth’s paintings. The artist initially sketches his compositions digitally, transfers the forms to the taped wooden panels in an act of drawing and further develops his pictorial language with templates. He uses these several times and plays with the positive and negative representation of the same form. This creates dynamic pictorial worlds of geometric and organic abstract elements in radiant colours that invite us to appreciate the complexity of nature.
Rebeka Erdő

Dániel Bernáth, Iris choreography, 2023, Acryl auf Sperrholz, 166 x 250 cm, Foto: Dániel Bernáth

The first thematic exhibition “LOOK” is a tribute to the founder of the museum, Heidi Goëss-Horten. It spotlights art and fashion and their inspiring interplay at the museum HEIDI HORTEN COLLECTION. The “look” of women and looking at women, as well as other aspects associated with the feminine, are key themes in the Heidi Horten Collection. Based on these topics, the exhibition explores various thematic questions in eight chapters.