Warhol's work inaugurates the brand new headquarters of the Albertina museum on the banks of the Danube | Culture | EUROtoday

Klosterneuburg is a novel location. In this small city north of Vienna are Dr. Hoffmann's former sanatorium the place Franz Kafka went to die and the Gugging Museum, certainly one of David Bowie's favorites, which flourished within the pavilion of a psychiatric hospital and reveals the perfect representatives of Art Brut. Here is the Dump Austria, the monastery that Emperor Charles VI of Habsburg constructed within the 18th century imitating the Madrid mannequin however which ultimately was left half carried out, with only a monumental façade that dazzles as you strategy town, and right here a number of the finest ones stand out. river seashores for swimming on the Danube. From Vienna you possibly can simply attain it by bicycle (or public transport) in simply over half an hour following the course of the river. And now there’s additionally the Albertina.

The goal of the opening is to facilitate entry to its assortment of up to date artwork after 1945, which exceeds 65,000 items. “The Albertina Klosterneuburg is a vision come true. The decentralized location on the outskirts of a large city represents a key stimulus for the region,” says the director of the Albertina, Klaus Albrecht Schröder, who’s leaving this yr after 25 years as head of the corporate. In 2020 he inaugurated the Albertina Modern to give attention to up to date artwork in a privileged house, the Künstlerhaus, after a renovation of virtually 60 million euros, and now he takes over the constructing that between 1999 and 2016 housed the colourful Essl Museum.

The uniqueness of Klosterneuburg is the primary problem for the Albertina as an artwork museum of worldwide standing. Its newest sequel just isn’t situated within the coronary heart of Vienna on the doorways of the Opera like the unique museum, nor in the course of Ringstrasse subsequent to the Musikverein – house of the New Year's Concert of the Vienna Philharmonic – just like the Albertina Modern, a satellite tv for pc middle ten minutes stroll from the mom home. To go to it it’s a must to transfer.

The Essl Museum opened its doorways in 1999 to exhibit top-of-the-line collections of up to date artwork on the earth, assembled by the magnate Karlheinz Essl, and closed in 2016, drowned by monetary issues. Since then it has served as a repository for the Albertina, which obtained the Essl assortment as a donation. For a time, on the horizon of Klosterneuburg, the Kaiser's trompe-l'oeil abbey and Heinz Tesar's demolished warehouse museum gave the impression to be in dialogue. The architect designed a vivid constructing with geometric, white and minimalist traces, harking back to a ship stranded on the banks of the Danube.

Schröder and Constanze Malissa have curated three exhibitions with a complete of 150 works and three,000 sq. meters of exhibition space. On the primary flooring, the customer is greeted by Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, protagonists of the exhibition. Pop Art. The good facet of life, a Monty Python-style adage to exhibit an inventive present that reveals to us between neons and resplendent colours that the whole lot – comics, newspapers, celebrities, folks – is vulnerable to changing into a fetish, a product, a pure object of consumption. Soon the canvases of Mel Ramos and Alex Katz and Jannis Varelas and Kiki Kogelnik seem. Also the suited hall by Robert Klemmer, the work with which the opening of the Albertina Modern was introduced to the world.

On the higher flooring it’s displayed From Hundertwasser to Kiefer: from the image of freedom to the shadows of the previous. If pop artwork is anxious with deciphering capitalism, Georg Baselitz, Jörg Immendorff, Markus Lüpertz and Anselm Kiefer centered on the ominous German previous within the Sixties. These artists, says curator Constanze Malissa, “used representation not as propaganda, but as a critique of their own history: the war, the division of Germany and the atomization of society.” They are accompanied by Maria Lassnig, the artist who developed the idea of “body consciousness” in works because the Nineteen Forties, the place the notion of 1's personal physique offers the start line for exploring the world.

The historic Albertina, the establishment that homes greater than one million artworks, most of them on canvas or paper, is dedicated to sculpture in Klosterneuburg. In the third exhibition, The wounded world, the works of Fritz Wotruba, Marc Quinn and Franz West are on show. It is a cupboard of horrors that portrays the whole lot from the AIDS epidemic to the crimes of the US military within the Iraqi jail of Abu Ghraib, the charred corpses of Auschwitz or the drama of the refugees. It is artwork's take a look at warfare, sickness, distress and loss of life. Although there’s additionally room for younger artists like Stefanie Holler able to evoking the nostalgia of an outdated typewriter with a stick of charcoal.

This yr the Albertina Klosterneuburg can be open from Thursday to Sunday till November 2. Klaus Albrecht Schröder says goodbye to the Albertina and needed to do it in a giant approach, with two new headquarters and the give attention to up to date artwork (within the Viennese salons they check with the museum with some sarcasm because the “Albrechtina”). It can be as much as the brand new boss from 2025, Ralph Gleis, till now chargeable for the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin, to determine what is going to occur sooner or later.

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