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

Edmund Kalb @ Leopold Museum, Vienna

Edmund Kalb

Leopold Museum, Vienna

24 May - 18 August 2019

EDMUND KALB 

Self-Portrait, 1929 

© Private collection, courtesy Rudolf Sagmeister 

Photo: Private collection, courtesy Rudolf Sagmeister

EDMUND KALB (Austrian, 1900–1952) is among the most fascinating artists of the 20th century. His intense oeuvre comprising more than one thousand self-portraits has remained largely unknown to the public. Commuting from 1926 to 1930 between the freedom of the Munich Art Academy, the intellectual confinement of his hometown of Dornbirn and the loneliness of the remote mountain village Ebnit, he developed his drawing skills towards complete abstraction. Relentlessly and without compromise, he approached his own face as his primary subject, depicting it in multiple series in order to explore all possible means of graphic representation as a “concept artist”. His goal was to render the process of thinking itself visible and to eventually bring only abstract “energy” to paper, so that he could then pursue visual art as pure thought. While he never sold a single work during his lifetime, he documented his work in photographs and corresponded in Esperanto with fellow artists worldwide. From 1930 his thinking was dominated by mathematics, mechanics, perceptual psychology, nuclear physics, space technology and plant breeding – fields that had impacted on his self-portraits even earlier. In this, his oeuvre shows similarities with that of Naum Gabo, Alexander Rodtschenko and artists of the Russian avant-garde. His fascination with the self-portrait, as well as the uncompromising nature and intensity of his work developed over a short period of time, connect him to the likes of Egon Schiele and Richard Gerstl.

His opposition to any form of false authority led to his conviction for insubordination by the National Socialist regime and a spell of several months in a military prison. Even after the War, Edmund Kalb served another months-long prison term for obstructing and insulting an officer. The consequences of his imprisonment with increased penalties eventually led to his premature death in 1952. His work was only discovered and appreciated posthumously by fellow artists.

Despite exhibitions, among others in New York, Rome, Dresden, Vienna and at the Kunsthaus Bregenz, which were accompanied by comprehensive catalogues, the life and oeuvre of Edmund Kalb remains a discovery and surprise for the larger public. Along with around 100 works by the artist, the exhibition at the Leopold Museum shows Stephan Settele’s 2002 film “Erwachsen aus dem Schicksal – Homage to Edmund Kalb”, which contains interviews with numerous contemporary witnesses and art historians.

EDMUND KALB

Catalogue accompagnying the exhibition

Editors: Hans-Peter Wipplinger, Rudolf Sagmeister, Kathleen Sagmeister

Authors: Rudolf Sagmeister, Kathleen Sagmeister, 

Klaus Albrecht Schröder, Hans-Peter Wipplinger

208 pages | ca. 180 images | bilingual German/English

Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, EUR 29,90

LEOPOLD MUSEUM

MuseumsQuartier, Museumsplatz 1, 1070 Wien

www.leopoldmuseum.org

Rembrandt, Albertina Museum, Vienna

Rembrandt

Albertina Museum, Vienna

March 26 - June 27, 2004

With this large Rembrandt exhibition, the Vienna Albertina dedicates another exhibition to one of the main masters of its collection. It is the first retrospective on Rembrandt’s work in Austria.

The exhibition brings together 30 paintings by Rembrandt with the most significant examples of his graphical oeuvre – 80 drawings and 70 etchings. This gives a suspenseful insight into the great universality of this most important and influential Dutch artist of the 17th century.

Rembrandt’s creative genius, his fascinating technical mastery in all media and the wide thematic spectrum in his work is honoured in a unique manner. The exhibition is organised into thematically oriented groups, within which one can study the fascinating interplay between the individual media.

The exhibition shows self-portraits, figure studies, nudes and animal studies, portraits, mythological and religious representations as well as landscapes from all creative periods of Rembrandt’s work.

The exhibited paintings include major works such as „Flora“ from London, „Landscape with Stone Bridge“ from Amsterdam, self-portraits from Munich and Vienna and „Sophonisba“ from Madrid. Brilliant sheets such as the „Reclining Lion“ from Paris or the „Reclining Nude“ from Amsterdam as well as gripping scenes such as „Hagar and Ishmael in the Desert“ from Hamburg and countless landscape drawings filled with light, air and atmosphere will be shown.

Loans from the most important collections of the world complete the excellent Albertina collection of drawings and etchings by Rembrandt, several of which were already acquired by the collection’s founder Albert von Sachsen-Teschen – and which the Albertina is famous for. This is why the Albertina was always – and especially under its director Otto Benesch from 1948 to 1961 – an important centre of Rembrandt research.

Among the exceptional aspects of Rembrandt’s artistic personality was his versatile creativity both in the thematic and the technical area – a rare case in the Dutch Golden Century, during which artists increasingly concentrated on special areas, sometimes even only on one specific technique. Rembrandt’s versatility is even present within single media, as is demonstrated in the Albertina collection’s more than 40 drawings. Every artistic phase, every thematic area and nearly every technique is represented in qualitative examples.

Hence the arrangement of thematically oriented groups in this exhibition unfolded in nigh-on natural manner. This arrangement is not a forced construction, but rather corresponds to the way in which Rembrandt himself ordered his drawings. From the inventory list made of Rembrandt’s possessions in 1656 we were able to deduce that Rembrandt kept his drawn studies in albums that were systematically ordered by categories such as nude figures, landscapes, figure studies, animal representations, views, drawings of antique figures and others.

It is an immediate consequence of Rembrandt’s way of working that it is nearly impossible to demonstrate creative processes or coherent work groups in these thematic complexes. As far as research has shown, Rembrandt brought nearly all his compositions without preparation immediately onto the canvas or etching plate.

Almost all his works, whether painted, drawn or etched, were the result of an autonomous artistic process and can be regarded individually. A quick landscape sketch thus appears as „completed“ and closed within itself as an exemplarily produced etching or an intricately detailed landscape painting does; the small chalk study of a beggar may demonstrate the same concentrated gift of observation as a life-size portrait may. The spectrum of Rembrandt’s creativity comes to life in multifarious ways in the ever-returning tension between small and large formats, between sketch-like and carefully designed compositions, of fine line structures and generous artistic forms. 

ALBERTINA MUSEUM

Albertinaplatz 1, 1010 Wien
www.albertina.at

Pop Art & Minimalism, Albertina Museum, Wien

Pop Art & Minimalism - The Serial Attitude
Albertina Museum, Wien
March 10 - August 29, 2004

As different as a drawing by Albrecht Dürer and one by Pablo Picasso may be in perspectives of time and of art, they are still connected by their being bound the same concept of the drawing, which is carried by the idea of subjective artistic signatures, and which is accompanied by the qualities of spontaneity and singularity, of caprice or masterful virtuosity. Even long before it was defined into an apparently generally valid definition, the art of drawing was immediately related to the history of genius and the signature-like externalisation of a singular personality. The ideal birthplace of the drawing is the private, intimate drawing cabinet, its locational opposite is the public billboard, technically the mechanic reproduction in an era of mass media is its diametrical opposite.

Against this background of the history and the alleged trans-chronologically valid nature of the idea of the drawing, the Albertina exhibition Pop Art & Minimalism: The Serial Attitude thus essentially marks a break with its own tradition, taking as its subject the common preference for the principle of „seriality“ in the allegedly non-related art movements of Pop and Minimal Art. Indeed, since the 1970’s a number of works that are marked by „seriality“ as a technical, conceptual and methodological process were acquired for the Albertina’s collections. The current exhibition clearly demonstrates the points of contact between the contrasting art movements without blurring the differences between the individual works.

The exhibition understands its subtitle The Serial Attitude essentially as guiding light, taken from the article by the same name published by the artist, critic and curator Mel Bochner in 1967 in the magazine Artforum. Bochner bids goodbye the traditional concept of an expressive art, whose origin is understood as the artist’s intuition in this essay – which is simultaneously analysis and manifesto – and proclaims a planned method following a pre-decided system analogous to contemporary modes of production. One could not imagine a greater difference to a Rembrandt drawing, the spontaneous capture of a coincidental observation.

Pop Art and Minimalism both consequentially include industrial production of series, preferably by screen printing and other mechanical methods of production, into the technical creation of a single work of art – as different as the appearance of the individual works may be. While Minimal Art is characterized by the radical negation of contents, Pop Art practically lived off the materiality of a commercial iconography spread by mass media.

Pop Art was the answer to an era of mass communication, of television, newspapers and magazines, and of advertising. Andy Warhol and Jim Dine, Roy Lichtenstein, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg reproduced the images of goods and objects of daily life, of billboards and of celebrities honoured as icons, spread far and wide via magazines’ offset print.

Minimal Art, on the other hand, negates in its self-reflection any form of representation. It prefers abstract primary structures and basic geometric forms. No subject and no motif, no ever so slight materiality feeds the illusion that was married to art for five centuries. The modules taken from the principle of industrial mass production break with any traditional idea of an artistic medium of the image.

Nevertheless, these differences must not obstruct the view of the commonalities. Serial methods such as addition, combination, permutation and mirroring shape the appearance and the design structures of the accordant print works by Donald Judd, the serigraphs of the Mao series by Andy Warhol or the 14-part series „Alex“ by Chuck Close.

Seriality, however, is not only present in multi-part works: the multi-part picture series is just one special case of the principle of seriality. (Pop Art and Minimal Art used the techniques of mechanical production of images.)

Seriality becomes the real subject in the mechanical reproduction technique of screen printing. The principle of repetition is immanent here in the single work itself. This moves the form of technical production into focus: the matrix dots of offset print. The industrial printing methods from the entire realm of photo-graphics is the answer to Jackson Pollock or Franz Klime’s physical expressionism. These methods of mechanical printing preferred by Sol Lewitt, Donald Judd, Agnes Martin, Brice Marden as much as by Warhol, Tom Wesselmann, Lichtenstein, Rauschenberg and Sigmar Polke can moreover be read as an answer to the crisis of structure of the printing method that had become too technical and artisan. When Lichtenstein and Judd made a woodcut, it became a conscious aping of a screen print without wood grain, without the material’s resistance. The photo-mechanical printing technique of screen printing was seen by printing aficionados for a long time as reproduction without its own artistic value for a good reason.

The exhibition Pop Art and Minimalism: The Serial Attitude is dedicated to this process of gaining independence from the traditional concept of drawing and print work via the principle of seriality. As wide as the spectrum of this principle’s application may be: in its entirety this exhibition seems to be telling of the end of a historical idea of drawing and print that was once the raison d’etre for our collection’s birth. However, it does certainly not speak against our collection that all exhibited works are part of the Albertina collection. Quite to the contrary, this fact underlines the high degree of critical self-reflection of our own raison d’etre, it is witness to our consciousness of our collection’s historicity: that of its creation and its reason, its nature and its structure.

Klaus Albrecht Schröder

Exhibited Artists:

Josef Albers, March 19, 1888 Bottrop (Germany) - Orange (Connecticut) March 25, 1976

Donald Baechler, Born 1956 in Hartford, Connecticut

Chuck Close, July 5, 1940 Monroe, Washington; lives in New York

Jim Dine, June 16, 1940 Cincinnati, Ohio; lives in New York and Putney, Vermont

Jasper Johns, May 15, 1930 Augusta, Georgia; lives in New York and Saint-Martin (Caribbean)

Donald Judd, June, 3 1928 Excelsior Springs, Missouri - New York February 12, 1994

Alex Katz, New York July 24, 1927; lives in New York

Imi Knoebel, December 31, 1940 Dessau as Klaus Wolf Knoebel; lives in Düsseldorf

Sol Lewitt, September 9, 1928 Hartford, Connecticut; lives in Chester (Connecticut) and Bari (Italy)

Roy Lichtenstein, October 27, 1923 New York - New York, September 29, 1997

Robert Mangold, October 12, 1937 Tonawanda, NY; lives in New York

Brice Marden, Bronxville, New York, October 15, 1938; lives in New York, Hydra (Greece) and in Eagles Mere, Pennsylvania

Agnes Martin, March 22, 1912 Maklin (Saskatchewan, Canada); lives in Taos, New Mexico

Blinky Palermo, June 2, 1944 Leipzig - Kurumba (Maldives) February 17, 1977

Sigmar Polke, February 13, 1941 Oels (Silesia, now Poland); lives in Cologne

Robert Rauchsenberg, October 22, 1925 Port Arthur, Texas; lives in Captiva, Florida

Robert Ryman, May 30, 1930 Nashville, Tennessee; lives in New York

Sean Scully, June 30, 1945 Dublin; lives in New York, Barcelona and Munich

Richard Serra, November 2, 1939 in San Francisco; lives in New York and Novia Scotia (Canada)

James Turell, May 6, 1943 Los Angeles; lives in Flagstaff, Arizona and Inishkeame, Ireland

Andy Warhol, August 6, 1928 Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania - New York, February 22, 1987

Tom Wesselmann, Born 1931 in Cincinnati, Ohio, lives in the USA

ALBERTINA
Albertinaplatz 1, 1010 Wien
www.albertina.at