Guan Xiao @ Kunsthalle Wien - 'Teenager' Exhibition

Guan Xiao: Teenager 

Kunsthalle Wien

8 October 2025 – 11 January 2026 

Guan Xiao 

Jeanake, 2025

© Guan Xiao, Courtesy the artist and 

David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles/New York

Guan Xiao 

Midhight Pancake, 2025

© Guan Xiao, Courtesy the artist and 

David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles/New York

Guan Xiao 

Cyclemony, 2025

© Guan Xiao, Courtesy the artist and 

David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles/New York

Installation view Guan Xiao: Teenager, 

Glitea, 2025, Kunsthalle Wien 2025

© Guan Xiao, Courtesy the artist and Antenna Space, Shanghai

Photo by Markus Wörgötter

Kunsthalle Wien presents the first solo exhibition in Austria by Guan Xiao (b. 1983, Chongqing, China). Comprising an entirely new body of sculpture and painting, it takes what Guan Xiao describes as the ‘ambiguous life stage’ of the teenager as a starting point for works that reflect upon the currents, conflicts and absurdities of a society impacted by the values of capitalism and liberalism:

A teenager is typically thought to be impulsive, led by their intuition and open to possibilities, changes and uncertainty. They can be dramatic, riven with self-doubt. I see them as both challenging and conquering reality and these ideas echo through this body of work which has a lot to do with this conflicted state of change and uncertainty. – Guan Xiao

Installation view Guan Xiao: Teenager, Kunsthalle Wien 2025

© Guan Xiao, Courtesy the artist and Antenna Space, Shanghai; 

David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles/New York 

and Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin/Munich 

Photo by Markus Wörgötter

Installation view Guan Xiao: Teenager, 

Torso, 2025, Kunsthalle Wien 2025

© Guan Xiao, Courtesy the artist 

Photo by Markus Wörgötter

Installation view Guan Xiao: Teenager, 

Torso, 2025, Kunsthalle Wien 2025

© Guan Xiao, Courtesy the artist 

Photo by Markus Wörgötter

A large, furry A-Frame structure bisects the space, creating a tunnel at the centre of the exhibition. Animated by light, it harbours a collection of cast aluminium objects including scaled-up items of cutlery, a moka pot and a series of enlarged eggs. Outside are a series of gnarled tree roots cast in brass, painted and appended with motorcycle parts and cartoon-like clouds of scribble. These anthropomorphic sculptures with mesh plates or antennae-like wands populate the space like a cast of characters. Two modular columns extend respectively pink and blue arms from aluminium, claw-like bases that resemble oversized bunches of bananas. On the walls, a triptych of panels simulates large, palette-shaped windows covered in a thick layer of paint.

Installation view Guan Xiao: Teenager, 

The spent siesta, like a sun-dried memory, 2025; Raining, 2025; 

Approaching Dust, 2025, Kunsthalle Wien 2025

© Guan Xiao, Courtesy the artist and 

David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles/New York

Photo by Markus Wörgötter

Guan Xiao 

Raining, 2025

© Guan Xiao, Courtesy the artist and  

David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles/New York

Guan Xiao 

Raining (detail), 2025

© Guan Xiao, Courtesy the artist and 

David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles/New York

Guan Xiao originally trained as a filmmaker before becoming known for creating sculpture that triggers an impulse for us to create our own narratives and tell stories about what we see. Earlier works resembled museological displays or photography studios that appeared to unite an eclectic selection of objects and images in one scheme. More recent sculpture refers to the Chinese custom of displaying polished tree roots in domestic settings. The practice of root carving dates back to the Warring States Period (474–221 BC), preserving the natural, given form of the wood. Its popularity over the centuries made it a symbol of economic wealth, while becoming a worn-out cultural cliché, denoting a lack of sophistication. In Guan Xiao’s work, the tree root becomes the basis of a singular, mythical creature in an ever-growing multitude of animal or human-like figures. Working with an array of elements – some meticulously hand-crafted, others mass produced – she references a broad range of cultural material that is defamiliarized and uncoupled from its associations to create an ambiguous, semi-fictional space and time.

Teenager returns to fundamental subjects such as food, clothing and shelter to address questions of progress and civilisation, tradition and spirituality that are central to the multi-faceted, playful and poetic work of Guan Xiao. The ‘conflicted state’ of the teenager is used as a metaphor for a society that the artist perceives to be suspended between ‘devotion and restraint’, needs and desires and ancient, philosophical, social and ethical values that are ‘in direct opposition’ to the economic system of capitalism:

China’s imperial history and Confucianism praise restraint suppress individuality. Yets imperial history and Confucianism praise restraint suppress individuality. Yets imperial history and Confucianism praise restraint suppress individuality. Yet subculture, independent cultures throughout history emphasise individuality […]. This contradiction is fundamentally between the philosophical systems of Asia and the economic system of capitalism – a conflict between two modes of thought […]. You might say captitalism is about 'construction', while Asian philosophy is about 'destruction.' – Guan Xiao

Guan Xiao

© Guan Xiao, Courtesy Guan Xiao Studio

Photo: Mathilde Agius and Art Basel

Artist Guan Xiao Biography  

Guan Xiao (b. 1983, Chongqing, China) has held solo exhibitions at Bonner Kunstverein; Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis (both 2019); Kunsthalle Winterthur (2018); Jeu de Paume, Paris (2016); K11 Art Foundation, Shanghai and ICA, London (both 2016). Her work has also been exhibited at Start Museum, Shanghai (2024); Mudam Luxembourg (2023 and 2021); Museum Ludwig, Cologne (2023); Mercedes-Benz Museum, Stuttgart; Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen (both 2022); the 34th Bienial de São Paulo; the 58th Belgrade Biennale (both 2021); X Museum Triennial; Kunstmuseum St. Gallen; Sharjah Art Foundation (all 2020); Triennale Kleinplastik Fellbach; Honolulu Biennial; Migros Museum, Zurich (all 2019); the 57th Venice Biennale; Julia Stoschek Collection, Berlin; M HKA Museum of Contemporary Art, Antwerp (all 2017); 9th Berlin Biennale; ZKM, Karlsruhe (both 2016) and the 13th Biennale de Lyon (2015). Her public art commissions include works for Skulpturenpark Köln (2020); Anyang Public Art Project (2019) and High Line, New York (2017). Guan Xiao lives and works in Beijing.

Publication: Kunsthalle Wien will publish an exhibition catalogue that will also be the first monograph on Guan Xiao. Published in English and German it includes new essays by Chelsea Qianxi Liu, curator at UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing and Sarah Johanna Theurer, curator at Haus der Kunst, Munich alongside an extensive interview between the artist and Michelle Cotton, Artistic Director Kunsthalle Wien.

KUNSTHALLE WIEN 

Museumsquartier, Museumsplatz 1, 1070 Vienna

www.kunsthallewien.at

Annerose Riedl @ Schlossmuseum Linz / Castell Museum Linz, Austria - Zwischen-Räume / In-Between Spaces Exhibition Curated by Inga Kleinknecht

Annerose Riedl 

Zwischen-Räume / In-Between Spaces

Schlossmuseum Linz / Castell Museum Linz, Austria

October 9, 2025 - February 8, 2026

Annerose Riedl

Ohne Titel [Untitled], 2025 

Acryl, Ölkreide auf Schullandkarte, 161 x 222 cm

Photograph by Thomas Radlwimmer © The Artist

Exhibition View, Annerose Riedl. Zwischen-Räume 

08.10.25 – 08.02.26, Schlossmuseum Linz

© OÖLKG, Michael Maritsch

Annerose Riedl 

Ohne Titel [Untitled], 2005 

Holz bemalt, 108 x 70 x 110 cm

Photograph by Thomas Radlwimmer © The Artist

Exhibition View, Annerose Riedl. Zwischen-Räume 

08.10.25 – 08.02.26, Schlossmuseum Linz

© OÖLKG, Michael Maritsch

Annerose Riedl - In-between spaces

In her exhibition Zwischen-Räume (In-Between Spaces), Austrian artist Annerose Riedl juxtaposes images of spatial situations with sculptures. In the images she paints on discarded school maps, she creates nearly empty spaces defined by the placement of a few perspective lines. Both the sculptures and the painted figures give the impression that she is transcending the boundaries between image and reality, moving into or out of the space.

Annerose Riedl 

Leiter für Alois, 2000

Birnenholz bemalt, 164 x 50 cm 

Photograph by Thomas Radlwimmer © The Artist

Annerose Riedl

Ohne Titel [Untitled], 2025

H 26 cm, Holz, Ton, Glassturz

Photograph by Thomas Radlwimmer © The Artist

Exhibition View, Annerose Riedl. Zwischen-Räume  

08.10.25 – 08.02.26, Schlossmuseum Linz

© OÖLKG, Michael Maritsch

Annerose Riedl - Between levels

In her spatial images, Annerose Riedl also combines the main motifs of her work, which include human figures and ladders. Her painted and wooden figures stand in groups in front of doorways or windows, or individually climb ladders from one spatial level to another. Some ladders lead upwards, others downwards, lean against the wall or lie on the floor. They at least offer the possibility of leaving a room or moving to other levels. In contrast, there are real, wooden ladders, on whose rungs the artist positions individual figures. These ladders lead nowhere and do not meet any safety standards. For Annerose Riedl, the "Ladders Without a Goal" take on the function of shelves for the storage of emotions, attitudes, or gestures.

Annerose Riedl 

Berührung, 1995

Holz bemalt, 117 x 15 x 30 cm 

© OÖ Landes-Kultur GmbH, Land Oberösterreich

Exhibition View, Annerose Riedl. Zwischen-Räume  

08.10.25 – 08.02.26, Schlossmuseum Linz

© OÖLKG, Michael Maritsch

Annerose Riedl - Female figures

Another sculptural focus of the exhibition is a series of works from Annerose Riedl's continuous creative phase. These primarily depict female figures who appear grounded, self-confident, and self-ironic.

Annerose Riedl, born in 1949 in Passau, lives and works in Brunnenthal near Schärding, Austria.

A bilingual catalogue in German and English will be published by Distanz Verlag to accompany the exhibition Annerose Riedl: Zwischen-Räume (In-Between Spaces) with a foreword by Alfred Weidinger and texts by Andrea Bina, Marion Bornscheuer, and Inga Kleinknecht.

Curated by Inga Kleinknecht

SCHLOSSMUSEUM / CASTEL MUSEUM LINZ

Schlossberg 1, 4020 Linz, Austria

www.ooekultur.at

Roger Ballen Exhibition in Austria at Museum Gugging, Maria Gugging - "roger ballen.! drawing meets photography" Exhibition

Roger Ballen.! drawing meets photography

Museum Gugging, Maria Gugging, Austria

September 25, 2025 – February 15, 2026

Roger Ballen

Funeral rites, 2004

© Roger Ballen

Roger Ballen

Untitled, 2020

© Roger Ballen

Roger Ballen

Wall shadows, 2003

© Roger Ballen

The exhibition roger ballen.! drawing meets photography by South African-based photo artist ROGER BALLEN (*1950) transcends the boundaries between photography and other art forms, at museum gugging.

Nina Ansperger and Roger Ballen in museum gugging

© NÖ Museum Betriebs GmbH, Daniel Hinterramskogler

"With Roger Ballen, we are bringing one of the most important and influential photographic artists of the 21st century to museum gugging," explains Nina Ansperger, the exhibition's curator. Over the past decades, his artistic work has evolved from narrative photography to a work increasingly dominated by drawing. Drawing is therefore the focus of this exhibition. "Roger Ballen is closely connected to Jean Dubuffet's idea of ​​Art Brut and defines himself as an 'outsider.' Drawing, as a central element of his photographic art, is simultaneously the most important medium of the art from Gugging. Thus, not only the subject matter but also the location of the exhibition could not be more appropriate," Nina Ansperger asserts. 

Roger Ballen, who refers to himself as an “outsider,” said: “I have brought drawing and photography into painting to produce a mixed medium image. It has been my goal to break down the boundaries between photography and other arts, taking photography out of its self-isolation as a form.” 

Roger Ballen in museum gugging

© NÖ Museum Betriebs GmbH, Daniel Hinterramskogler

New York-born Roger Ballen has lived in South Africa for several decades. His photographic works, created over 40 years, possess incredible narrative power because they oscillate between painting, drawing, installation, and photography. His “Ballenesque” aesthetic is unsettling, vehemently demands self-reflection and leads to a journey into one’s own unconscious.

Curator: Nina Ansperger

MUSEUM GUGGING

Am Campus 2, 3400 Maria Gugging

www.museumgugging.at

Daniel Richter @ Thaddaeus Ropac Salzburg - "Mit elben Birnen" Exhibition

Daniel Richter: Mit elben Birnen

Thaddaeus Ropac Salzburg

Through 27 September 2025

Thaddaeus Ropac Salzburg presents a new series of paintings by German artist DANIEL RICHTER. Created over the past year, these large-scale works navigate a space between figuration and abstraction, characterised by chaotic entanglements of fragmented bodies. Creature-like forms are depicted against jagged fields of colour in bright, contrasting tones, evoking a sense of rebellious energy and electric vibrancy.

Daniel Richter’s painting has been marked by a continual formal transformation since the beginning of his career. While opaque, monochrome areas of colour characterised Richter’s work of the past few years, the backgrounds of these new, intensely colourful compositions appear torn or singed. At times, the candy-coloured shapes that seem to race across the canvas are delineated by black, dense lines; at others, they seem to detach from the background or erupt across the pictorial space.

In some works, the artist leaves behind traces of his physical presence as visible fingermarks on the canvas, intensifying a heightened sense of primordial energy and unresolved conflict. ‘The dynamic in my work is mainly based on pushing and shoving, or on elements that are being confronted by each other – mingling, pushing, pulling,’ Daniel Richter explains.

The temporal and spatial indeterminacy of scenes refuses to resolve into a coherent time, place, or even pictorial space. The works appear to depict surreal landscapes of the mind or imagination rather than representations of any external world. Colours clash or recede with intense emotional charge, the bold contrasts and abstract patterns recalling the formal vocabulary of Clyfford Still. And yet, despite the underlying violence, the works convey a touching sensuality and beauty that counterbalances their restless energy.

The exhibition’s title references the opening line of Friedrich Hölderlin’s poem Half of Life, which Daniel Richter cryptically rephrases. The poem is centred around a stark contrast between idealised beauty and a world marked by emptiness. The lines, which sound almost prophetic in today’s political climate, accompanied Daniel Richter during the creation of this series. Hölderlin’s image of creaking weathervanes can be read as a symbol of the fragile, often fractured order of our time.

Friedrich Hölderlin

‘Half of Life’

With its yellow pears

And wild roses everywhere

The shore hangs into the lake,

O gracious swans,

And drunk with kisses

You dip your heads

In the sobering holy water.

Ah, where will I find

Flowers, come winter,

And where the sunshine

And shade of the earth?

Walls stand cold

And speechless, in the wind

The weathervanes creak.

The anarchic humour of his titles is typical of the artist, whose sensibility for the absurd and the drastic is also closely linked to the Hamburg music scene and punk. The city, where Daniel Richter studied under Werner Büttner from 1992 to 1996, has played a pivotal role in his life and career, serving as both a formative backdrop for his artistic development and a long-standing base from which he emerged as one of Germany’s most influential contemporary painters.

Artist Daniel Richter

Born in Eutin, Germany, Daniel Richter lives and works in Berlin. He studied at the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg from 1992–96 under Werner Büttner, and later worked as an assistant to Albert Oehlen. Comprehensive solo exhibitions of Richter’s work have been held at Kunsthalle Tübingen (2023); Space K, Seoul (2022); 21er Haus, Vienna (2017); Camden Arts Centre, London (2017); Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek (2016); TAXISPALAIS Kunsthalle Tirol, Innsbruck (2014); Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt (2014); Kestner Gesellschaft, Hannover (2011); CAC Málaga and Denver Art Museum (both 2008); Hamburger Kunsthalle (2007); National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (2005); and Kunsthalle Kiel; Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf (2001).

Daniel Richter’s works are included in renowned collections worldwide, among them the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Hamburger Kunsthalle; the Nationalgalerie, Berlin; the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart; the Museum of Fine Arts Leipzig; the Kunstmuseum Den Haag; the Contemporary Art Collection of the Federal Republic of Germany; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Denver Art Museum; and the Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain, Strasbourg. In 2023, the Oscar-winning director Pepe Danquart released the documentary Daniel Richter, offering a multifaceted insight into the artist’s life and work.

In December, a major retrospective will open at the Museum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte Schloss Gottorf (until February 2026).

THADDAEUS ROPAC SALZBURG

Salzburg Villa Kast, Mirabellplatz 2, 5020 Salzburg

ropac.net

Related Posts:

In English

Daniel Richter 

Kunsthalle Tübingen (2023)

Daniel Richter: Pink Flag – White Horse 

National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (2005)

En Français

Daniel Richter. Drapeau rose – Cheval blanc

Musée des beaux-arts du Canada, Ottawa (2005)

Daniel Richter: Mit elben Birnen

Thaddaeus Ropac Salzburg, 25 July — 27 September 2025

Milica Tomic @ Kunsthaus Graz - "On Love Afterwards" Retrospective Exhibition

Milica Tomić

On Love Afterwards

Kunsthaus Graz

27 June - 12 October 2025

MILICA TOMIC

One day, instead of one night, 

a burst of machine-gun fire will flash, 

if light cannot come otherwise (2009), Belgrade, 

Photo: Srđan Veljović

MILICA TOMIC

One day, instead of one night, 

a burst of machine-gun fire will flash, 

if light cannot come otherwise (2010), Copenhagen

Photo: Srđan Veljović

On Love Afterwards investigates how art can open up and explore the topics of responsibility, visibility and injustice. In line with Milica Tomić’s practice, the show considers exhibiting as a verb rather than the exhibition as subject. Her complex approach evolves around the object, but the focus is not on the object itself as much as on the negative space surrounding it, the space that enables it.

This means that the works contain complex layers that unfold in front of the viewer. When Milica Tomić confronts us with the image or portrait of a woman it is never solely as a representation of female identity – instead, the artist exposes the political and social nuances which construct that identity. Similarly, she deals with the specificity of an image of war in a way that recognises that the image and its brutality go far beyond their depiction. Thus her works aim to fill in the blank space surrounding the missing image, while asking the viewer to think about the conditions of production and construction of such an image.

In her projects she has made a shift from individual to collective artistic practice, exploring and testing out new forms of collectivity. She is a founding member of the Yugoslav art and theory group Grupa Spomenik (or Monument Group) and founder of the interdisciplinary project and working group Four Faces of Omarska.

The exhibition offers an overview of her practice and presents a number of projects including Ungelöst XY (1997), I am Milica Tomić (1998), The Portrait of My Mother (1999), Alone (2001), Reading Capital (2004), One day, Instead of One Night, a Burst of Machine-Gun Fire will Flash, if Light Cannot Come Otherwise (2009), Last Letter (2010), Container, Reconstruction of a Crime (2004-2011).

Over the course of the exhibition, each of the works on show are contextualised by an archive that intertwines with them. The role of this fluctuating archive is to invite viewers to explore and delve into a particular topic. At the same time, it situates the pieces exhibited here as part of a larger research process continuing in the background.

MILICA TOMIC

I am Milica Tomić 1998 

One-channel video installation, 

c, sound, 9’58’’, loop, video stills

Milica Tomić was born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia and since 2014 has served as the Chair of the Institute for Contemporary Art at Graz University of Technology in Austria. This retrospective exhibition offers an insight into her practice by means of selected projects. Her work continuously returns to the questions of absence, memory, political violence and social asymmetries. Tomić’s art practice is research-based and spans the mediums of photography, video, installation art, discursive, educational art, performance and socio-political engagement.

Curators: Andreja Hribernik, Irena Borić

KUNSTHAUS GRAZ

Lendkai, 8020 Graz, Austria

www.museum-joanneum.at

sexy... @ Galerie Gugging, Maria Gugging - Featured Artists: Basel Al-Bazzaz, Johann Garber, Helga Sophia Goetze, Julia Hanzl, Johann Korec, Hannes Lehner, Karl Vondal

sexy... Basel Al-Bazzaz, Johann Garber, Helga Sophia Goetze, Julia Hanzl, Johann Korec, Hannes Lehner, Karl Vondal

Galerie Gugging, Maria Gugging 

February 20 – May 11, 2025

JOHANN GARBER

A.LADY, 1988

Ink, 14,7 x 10,4 cm

© Privatstiftung - Künstler aus Gugging

HELGA SOPHIA GOETZE

Untitled, 2001

Pencil, embroidery, 76 x 77,8 cm

© Sammlung Pott

BASEL AL-BAZZAZ

Wicked beauty by night, 2021

Pencil, colored pencils, 42 x 56 cm

Courtesy galerie gugging

In the exhibition “sexy…”, seven unique artists come together at the Galerie Gugging and whisk the visitors away into their erotic worlds. From the sexy works of the Gugging Artists Johann Garber, Johann Korec and Karl Vondal to the fascinating universe of Helga Sophia Goetze, the oriental women of Basel Al-Bazzaz, the naked men of Hannes Lehner and the ceramics of Julia Hanzl. 

The depiction of naked bodies has a long tradition, from the earliest cave paintings to the present day. Many Gugging Artists and their national and international colleagues have also taken up the theme from the very beginning.

BASEL AL-BAZZAZ

Moulin Rouge, 2020

Pencil, colored pencils, 42 x 56 cm

Courtesy galerie gugging

Basel Al-Bazzaz presents his colourful oeuvre. The artist, who was originally born in Baghdad, has been working in a print workshop in Vienna since 2000, where he creates fine, detailed works on paper that have a special effect on the viewer. Using watercolours, pencils and coloured pencils to create works of art is Al-Bazzaz’s great passion. His playful, erotic depictions of women also reflect his longing for the Orient. While he often uses models for his depictions of plants and animals, the inspiration for his depictions of naked women comes from his own imagination.

HELGA SOPHIA GOETZE

Untitled, n.d.

Pencil, 21 x 29,6 cm

© Sammlung Pott

HELGA SOPHIA GOETZE

Untitled, n. d.

Pencil, gouache,  colored pencils, 29,7 x 21 cm

© Sammlung Pott

The German artist Helga Sophia Goetze (1922 - 2008) was born in Magdeburg. She was a feminist icon, who loved to break boundaries and boldly share her views out into the world. Goetze left behind a fascinating universe of painted pictures, embroidered carpets, sketches, collages and an extensive written legacy, including numerous poems. She was known and infamous for her “vigil” at the Berlin Memorial Church, where she held out for an hour every day for over 20 years from 1983 to proclaim her message: “Fucking is peace!” The Galerie Gugging shows a tapestry and sketches by the artist and poet, who was an investigative, sharp observer and chronicler of her time, as part of the sexy… exhibition.

JOHANN GARBER

A-JUNGLE, 2010

Indian Ink, 29,7 x 42 cm

© Privatstiftung - Künstler aus Gugging

The Gugging Artist Johann Garber is best known for his dense Indian ink drawings. A recurring theme in his work are his so-called “Sexi papers”. These have even adorned the renowned Museum of Sex on 5th Avenue in New York. “If you ask Johann Garber why he keeps drawing naked people, his answer is: because that is how we are born! – We come like this … and we leave like this”, says galerie gugging director Nina Katschnig with a smile. Johann Garber was born in Wiener Neustadt and has lived in the House of Artists in Gugging since 1981.

Julia Hanzl is an innovative ceramic artist from Vienna, who has already made a name for herself across borders, especially in the United States, and grew up in a family of artists. The self-taught artist, whose works usually have a provocative sexy-erotic touch, is appreciated for her unmistakable ceramics, mixed media sculptures, porcelain & bronze editions and ceramic sculptures in combination with taxidermy. Julia Hanzl lives and works in Mödling.

JOHANN KOREC

Lovers in winter, 1998

Acrylic on canvas, 100 x 100 cm

© Art Brut KG

JOHANN KOREC

Alexandera Korbus:, 2003

Indian Ink, Watercolours, 18,9 x 13,9 cm

© Art Brut KG

For the Gugging Artist Johann Korec, the nude depiction of couples was the predominant favourite theme in his works, which he celebrated extensively. Korec lived in the House of Artists in Gugging from 1981 until his death in 2008. While he began his artistic career by tracing figures, drawing and painting lovers later became his preferred motif. The protagonist was almost always the artist himself. He usually added a description of the subjects at the bottom of the picture, making the works appear like a diary. His depicted partners did not come from his imagination, but were often actual girlfriends from the time. In 1990, he was awarded the Oskar Kokoschka Prize, as was Johann Garber with the group of the Gugging Artists.

HANNES LEHNER

Naked Man with column, 2023

Acrylic, pencil, coloured pencils

42 x 29,7 cm

Courtesy galerie gugging

HANNES LEHNER

Sensual naked man, 2023

Acrylic, pencil, coloured pencils

42 x 29,7 cm

Courtesy galerie gugging

Born in Vienna in 1986, Hannes Lehner loves muscular bodies, enjoys going to the gym and wanted to become an underwear model himself. The artist’s creative career includes central themes such as landscapes, architecture, automobiles, outer space, fantastic animal figures and now also male nudes. Over the years, he has created an extensive oeuvre that includes drawings, paintings and three-dimensional objects. The lively artist, who is always up for a joke, uses acrylic, coloured pencil, gouache or paperboard for his works. Hannes Lehner’s sexy, well-trained men, usually staged in bright colours, are the logical continuation of his popular houses and cars.

KARL VONDAL

She loves music, 2023

Acrylic, pencil, coloured pencils, Indian Ink

29,8 x 70 cm

© Privatstiftung - Künstler aus Gugging

KARL VONDAL

With kisses both, 2022

Mixed media, 59,4 x 42 cm

© Privatstiftung - Künstler aus Gugging

The Gugging Artist Karl Vondal is describes by the Galerie Gugging director Nina Katschnig as the “master of eroticism from Gugging”. Vondal lived in the House of Artists in Gugging from 2002 to 2024 and had a particular fondness for erotic depictions, which he worked on tirelessly day and night. His nude women and loving couples usually appear with him in the role of the prince – in delicate pastel tones, which became more vibrant towards the end of his career. The protagonists of his works are often found on islands under palm trees or above the roofs of towns and villages. Similar to Johann Korec, his works are usually accompanied by illustrious stories. In sexy… the Galerie Gugging exhibits small and large works, some of which have been elaborately and very vividly staged with matchsticks.

GALERIE GUGGING

At Campus 2, 3400 Maria Gugging, Austria

galeriegugging.com

Robert Longo @ Albertina Museum, Vienna

Robert Longo

The ALBERTINA Museum, Vienna

September 4, 2024 – January 26, 2025

 

As an artist, I feel a moral imperative to preserve

the images of our shared dystopic present

with the hope that something will one day change. -- Robert Longo [1]

The ALBERTINA has a special connection to Robert Longo: “It was around 20 years ago that we were able to reopen the Albertina in 2003 with Robert Longo's exhibition ‘The Freud Drawings’. In my last year as General Director of the Albertina, we are looking back on these beginnings and dedicating a comprehensive retrospective to the outstanding American artist. The repositioning of the Graphic Art Collection began with Robert Longo. Instead of continuing to collect conventionally in cassette format and seeing the drawing primarily as a sketch or study that prepares the actual work of art, since this Longo exhibition in 2003 we have for the first time made the development of contemporary art towards the monumental, drawn ‘picture’ the guiding principle of a contemporary collection and museum mission: Franz Gertsch, Anselm Kiefer and many others, who had previously been ignored by the Albertina because of their large-format works, defined our new self-image from this point onwards”, says ALBERTINA General Director Klaus Albrecht Schröder.

The show features important key works from the various periods of his production, beginning with Men in the Cities, the series that made him famous overnight and embodied the zeitgeist of early 1980s New York like few other works. The exhibition also presents the Bodyhammers, in which the artist expresses his unease with gun culture in the United States, as well as works from the Freud cycle. The latter is based on photographs secretly taken in Freud’s office and apartment for documentation purposes, before he had to flee from the Nazis to London in 1938. Also featured are works from God Machines, in which Robert Longo addresses monotheistic world religions, and The Destroyer Cycle, in which he takes up events from global politics.

Robert Longo: Monuments in black and white

Robert Longo is known for his monumental hyperrealistic works: powerful, dynamic charcoal drawings whose virtuoso technique and the visual force of the motifs mesmerize the observer. For his models, Robert Longo uses photographs that record dramatic situations at the moment of their greatest tension. The artist is concerned here with the depiction of power—in nature, politics, history. He utilizes visual material that has been reproduced thousands of times, and which has long been a part of pop culture, of our collective visual memory. Longo isolates and reduces the motifs so as to raise their visual impact to a higher power. By enlarging the subject and intensifying the lighting into a dramatic chiaroscuro, we find ourselves before gigantic, previously unseen theatrical images. Longo draws on existing images, references reality secondhand, and creates impressive “copies” of the original black-and-white photographs, which pale beside their transformation into colossal charcoal drawings.

The dramatic lighting and shadow effects of the charcoal drawings emphasize the objects’ plasticity and the spatial depth. They make the motif appear as real as it is unreal. The deep black of the charcoal rubbed into the paper swallows up all of the light. Paradoxically, Robert Longo is ultimately capable, like no one else, of evoking brightness and radiant light, transparency, and differentiated materiality with the blackness of charcoal.

Robert Longo and the Pictures Generation

In the late 1970s Robert Longo belonged to the so-called Pictures Generation, a loose grouping of New York artists that critically engaged with mass media and pop culture in their works. His iconic large-scale series of drawings Men in the Cities (1979–83; pp. 31–39) in their extreme, dynamic poses aptly expressed the fragile mood— fraught with tension—of the 1980s. New York in those days was dominated as much by financial wealth, a real estate boom, and yuppie culture as it was by rising criminality, drug problems, and social inequality, polarizing the city. The neoconservative politics of the Reagan era and the threat posed by the Cold War contributed to a climate of insecurity. Longo’s severely formal drawings echo this sentiment. The figures are dressed in “urban uniforms and Film Noir attire” [2] against a white background, in an empty space, each one isolated, frozen in a moment of intense movement and physical contortion. The artist found a correspondence in the intensely stylized representation of black-and-white contrasts, originating in news media and black-and-white films. [3] Robert Longo prefers these abstract symbols to be installed as a group in order to create a rhythmic tension. He thereby also articulates their individually experienced inner turmoil in a collectively lived structure marked by tension and pressure.

The dramatics and the composition of an image play a central role in Longo’s work. For the God Machines (2008–11; pp. 110–15), his portrayal of places of worship, he creates an atmosphere of reverence and sublimity through overwhelming size, through light and shadow, as well as through the perspective that expresses the power of religious institutions. A detailed elaboration of a bullet hole in close-up (pp. 15, 102/103), which allows the observer to recognize every crack and every splitter in the glass, literally draws us into the violence of the moment. By precisely rendering the mushroom cloud (p. 87) in central perspective, the artist transmits not only the enormous power, brutality, and destructive force of the catastrophic event of an atom bomb exploding, but also the feeling of fascination in the face of the terrifying beauty of this phenomenon.

Longo’s visual universe is fueled by personal impressions, influences, and topics connected with U.S. society, politics, and pop culture, as well as significant global events. Police brutality and racism, war and terrorism, the exercise of power, repression, and violence all find expression in his works. Yet even if the motifs appear personal, the artist is not concerned alone with the expression of an individual emotion.

Robert Longo: Raft at Sea

It is one of Robert Longo’s most impressive and at the same time most poignant works: Untitled (Raft at Sea) (2016–17; pp. 12/13, 184/185) depicts a rubber dinghy on the high seas, overloaded with its cargo of refugees and dangerously low in the water. The people in it, mostly men, sit on the edge of the rubber ring, disturbingly close to the water’s surface. They wear caps, hats, and thick jackets under their life vests, indicating the inhospitable temperatures. The composition situates the boat on the horizon line in the upper third of the image, on the central panel of the monumental charcoal drawing. The entire area underneath is the dark sea with its turbulent waves, to which the dinghy and its passengers are exposed. An overcast sky stretches above, becoming less clouded over to the right—at least promising a little hope. We observe the scene not from a secure perspective from above, from a larger ship, or from the air, but on the same level as the rubber raft. We might, therefore, be in a similar dinghy or even in the water amid the waves. The artist has thus placed us in the same predicament as the people shown in his drawing, who are risking their lives to flee.

For Raft at Sea, Robert Longo draws on an image we have often seen in the media in recent years. Yet in the whirlwind of images that swirl around us every day, we no longer perceive the situation in all of its harrowing intensity, because we have, to a certain degree, become accustomed to it. Through the artist’s altered composition and the enormous size of the work, Longo forces us to look once more and to engage with what is presented.

In his charcoal drawings, he appropriates the pathos, aesthetics, and narrative of film, the visual language of the cinema. Drawing on his experience as a film director and his work on music videos for bands such as New Order and R.E.M., Robert Longo often brings a cinematic gaze to the creation of his works. His motifs recall film stills that capture a moment of tension, an emotional climax. This dramatic component is experienced anew every time we see a work, as if it is happening right now, thereby acquiring a timeless quality. 

[1] Robert Longo in conversation with the author on June 27, 2024.

[2] The information and the following quotations are from a conversation between the artist and the author on February 22, 2024.

[3] In addition to film and television, Robert Longo was also influenced by the energy of the downtown punk and New Wave music scene. See the essay by Holger Liebs in this publication: Jerking into Now. Robert Longo’s Men in the Cities and the “Pictures Generation,” 23.

Curator: ELSY LAHNER 

Assitant: MELISSA LUMBROSO 

ALBERTINA MUSEUM

Albertinaplatz 1, 1010 Vienna

www.albertina.at

Updated Post - 09-07-2025

Gottfried Helnwein @ ALBERTINA Museum, Vienna - Reality and Fiction

Gottfried Helnwein 

Reality and Fiction 

ALBERTINA Museum, Vienna 

25 October 2023 – 11 February 2024 

To mark the seventy-fifth birthday of the artist Gottfried Helnwein, who was born in Vienna in 1948, the ALBERTINA presents a comprehensive exhibition of his output of the past three decades. Every single work of his is an accusation of cruelty and ruthlessness, of the horrors of fascism.

Gottfried Helnwein’s work stands out for its uncompromising realism, which denounces social ills and focuses on the innocent, defenseless child. Children embody psychological and social fears, as well as the pain inflicted upon them by abuse, power, and violence.

The artist’s hyperrealist images, which are always based on photographic models, are “bigger than life” while impressing us with their technical perfection. Although the works are perceived as real, their oversized dimensions and the use of monochromy contradict reality; Gottfried Helnwein moves away from the original impression of reality his pictures pretend to convey, seeking to create a symbolic image. In his pictorial cosmos, the artist combines motifs from diametrically opposed worlds: manga characters and war photography, Donald Duck and Adolf Hitler, the Virgin Mary and Nazi henchmen.

In the series “The Disasters of War,” which Gottfried Helnwein has worked on since 2007, he integrates manga-inspired figures of girls into disaster scenarios. Through this bizarre fusion of manga elements with real catastrophes, the artist highlights the absurdity of these incidents. Although the manga style is omnipresent in today’s popular culture, Helnwein initially found it alien and disturbing. For him, this style symbolizes an artificial childishness that does not seem human, but cold and synthetic.

Occasionally, girls in military uniforms or carrying weapons in their hands appear in Gottfried Helnwein’s pictures, sometimes with bandages or bloody wounds. The scenes recall child soldiers or teenage shooters running amok in the United States. The artist thus addresses the susceptibility of children to all forms of manipulation and how they are abused ideologically. The cartoon characters in his pictures seem like perfidiously imagined “whisperers” and at the same time emphasize the madness of these delusions that have become images. Mickey Mouse, monstrous and with bared teeth, reveals a latent dark side and unmasks the evil that hides behind its otherwise friendly façade. Approaching a child’s bed, the eerie yellow birdman with his long pointed beak likewise seems to have emerged from a nightmare.

Gottfried Helnwein ties in with the world of children, where imaginary things and fantasy constructs have the same right to exist as real things: the monster under the bed becomes a real danger, the teddy bear feels authentic emotions, and the closet door becomes the entrance to an alien realm. But here in the picture, nothing springs from a child’s blossoming imagination; on the contrary, Gottfried Helmwein blurs the line between reality and nightmare to illustrate that monsters do exist.

Gottfried Helnwein has translated his themes into a wide variety of techniques and media: from his early watercolors and drawings, his actions and their photographic documentation, to paintings, stage sets for theater productions, and installations in public spaces. Oftentimes the genres merge, or elements that were originally created in one context are used in another. Gottfried Helnwein thus sees himself primarily as a conceptual artist. In the 1980s, at the time of his move to Germany, the artist realized that format had come to play a role in his art. He concluded that his works would have to become larger if they were to compete for attention with the flood of images, advertisements, posters, and billboards. With this caesura in his oeuvre, his portraits of children became monumental, sometimes covering entire façades of buildings. Gottfried Helnwein lends children an extraordinary presence that conveys the importance and urgency of his themes. In their larger-than-life size and hyperrealist mode of representation, and with the artist reproducing every detail with incredible accuracy, the figures come up to an exaggeration of reality that disturbs and simply overwhelms us.

Gottfried Helnwein’s work seems to impress us just because of this very tension between realism and the transcendence of the artistic object. The symbolic figures and motifs of violence take over in our minds, for what we see may well be a face smeared with blood, but this face is neither bleeding nor contorted with pain.

Curator: Elsy Lahner

Gottfried Helnwein

Editor: Elsy Lahner, Klaus Albrecht Schröder

Published by Hirmer Verlag, 2023

Available in German and in English

152 pages, 28,5 x 24,5 cm, Hardcover

ISBN: 9783777442082

Accompanying the exhibition a 152 pages comprehensive catalogue is published containing texts by Elsy Lahner and Klaus Speidel, as well as quotes by the artist himself.

ALBERTINA Museum

Albertinaplatz 1 - 1010 Vienna

www.albertina.at

Michelangelo and Beyond @ ALBERTINA Museum, Vienna - Exhibition + Catalogue

Michelangelo and Beyond

ALBERTINA Museum, Vienna

15 September 2023 - 14 January 2024

Michelangelo Buonarroti

Male Nude Seen from Rear, c. 1504

Black chalk, heightened with white, 20 x 27 cm

The ALBERTINA Museum, Vienna

Michelangelo Buonarroti

Seated Nude Youth and Two Arm Studies, 1510/11 

Red chalk, heightened with white, 28 x 19 cm

The ALBERTINA Museum, Vienna

The master of the Renaissance: Michelangelo is one of a handful of artists whose fame has been unwavering for centuries. Although his art and his ideals are deeply rooted in the attitudes of the time – the heyday of the Renaissance and the progressive 16th century – the impact of his work extends into the present day.

Every century experiences its own Michelangelo Renaissance, and in doing so revives the historic ideal of the perfect male nude developed by the prominent Florence native on an unrivalled scale through his drawings for the incomplete fresco the Battle of Cascina, the Ignudi in the Sistine Chapel and the Dying Slave for the tomb of Pope Julius II.

Michelangelo and Beyond deals with the emergence and the power, the decrease in significance and the decline of a canon – a canon on which Michelangelo and his works made a lasting impression 500 years ago – and how the generations that followed have approached this template since.

The depiction of the human body

The richly populated portfolio of graphic pieces at the ALBERTINA allows for examination of the Michelangelo ideal, which is strikingly conveyed in both his drawings and his sculptures as the athletic and powerful male nude, whose inner tension appears to want to burst out of the body.

The new status of the drawing as its own work of art in the 15th century solidified the artistic concept and the temperament of the artist, and was reflected by the high demand of collectors for these valuable items. The provenance of the drawings by the Renaissance master at the ALBERTINA shows Peter Paul Rubens to be the owner in the 17th century, which highlights the importance of the Italian genius for subsequent generations of artists.

Albrecht Dürer

Adam and Eve, 1504

The ALBERTINA Museum, Vienna

Raffaello Santi 

A Young man Carrying an Old Man, 1514

The ALBERTINA Museum, Vienna

Hendrick Goltzius

The Gret Hercule, 1589

The ALBERTINA Museum, Vienna

Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn 

Naked Woman Seated on a Mound, c. 1631 

The ALBERTINA Museum, Vienna

Egon Schiele 

Nude Self-Portrait, Grimacing, 1910 

The ALBERTINA Museum, Vienna

On the one hand, the classical nude as we encounter it in the drawings in the ALBERTINA Museums’ Collections, from Michelangelo to Raffael and Beccafumi to Bandinelli, da Volterra and Salviati, always strives for the harmonious balance between generic formulas like standardised poses, the study of the anatomy according to ancient sculptures or the full-scale outline of body parts according to the formalised proportions of the Vitruvian man, and emulating nature on the other hand.

With their opposing positions, artists Rembrandt and Rubens shape the Baroque period. Rubens deals with the real, living model and brings back ancient nakedness in a new guise.

Rembrandt, on the other hand, doesn’t shy away from portraying the ugliness of the authentic body, of people in their impermanence and weakness. In doing so, he strikes a harsh contrast with the athletic body of Buonarroti.

In Classicism, the image of the beautiful and muscular naked male body continues. Almost 200 years after the death of Florence’s master, the Michelangelesque canon finds its sequel in the prevalent depiction of the ideal nude. The painters of the time, such as Anton Raphael Mengs or Pompeo Girolamo Batoni, create works that return to Michelangelo with their precision in shaping the musculature, the portrayal of complicated poses and perspective foreshortening contingent on complex postures. They are particularly reminiscent of his superlative drawings, associated with works like the Battle of Cascina or the ceiling fresco in the Sistine Chapel.

Just as slavishly and anachronistically, artists in the time of Klimt and Schiele imitate the heroic, athletic design, but more outwardly, superficially, without the intellectual depth of Buonarroti. This canon, shaped by Michelangelo, finally reaches its peak, as the depiction of the male nude as a symbol of a heroic individual finds increasingly diminishing resonance in modern society.

The exhibition bears the historic sign that for centuries, only men drew men, and women were also only drawn by men. A man defined the canon of the male nude to the extent of that of the female nude. Michelangelo himself drew very few naked women, instead lending the male body a feminine grace.

A woman in art is like the dark side of the moon: you know it exists, but it’s terra incognita. In a few typical examples from the 17th and 18th centuries, the exhibition displays the unrealistic ideal of the woman. For a long time, the depiction of a naked woman was discriminated against and discredited for identifying with vices, immorality and sexual instincts. The immorality of women leads to death and sin in the form of Eve; the sexual instinct of Luxuria appears vain and naked. The virtuous are largely cloaked in flowing robes. The antithesis of virtuously veiled women describes the naked woman as a female force, as a witch, as a seductive Venus.

The outlook at the end of the exhibition has been chosen as an example. It represents a century in which Michelangelo’s canon has lost its authority and devotes itself to the opposition between Secessionist beauty by means of Gustav Klimt’s curvy ideal of the woman and the ugliness and pathologizing of the first nude not robbed of its sexuality by Egon Schiele.

Curators: 

Klaus Albrecht Schröder, Achim Gnann, Eva Michel, Martina Pippal, Constanze Malissa

Michelangelo and beyond

Editors: Eva Michel and Klaus Albrecht Schröder

Published by Prestel Verlag, 2023

English & German, 264 pages, 28,5 x 24,5 cm, Hardcover

ISBN: 9783791391168

Accompanying the exhibition Michelangelo and Beyond an exhibition catalogue of the same title is published. On 264 pages numerous contributions examine the rediscovery of the ancient Greco-Roman idea of the ideal body by Michelangelo, as well as his influence on artists far beyond his time into the 20th century. Through emulation, evolution or absolute rejection of Michelangelo’s ideal, artists like Raffael, Dürer, Rembrandt, Rubens, Klimt and Schiele developed their own perceptions of the body.

The ALBERTINA Museum

Albertinaplatz 1 - 1010 Vienna

www.albertina.at