Exhibition programme 2013
Max Ernst
23 January – 5 May 2013
In devoting an exhibition to Max Ernst, the ingenious inventor of images, the Albertina will present the artist’s
first retrospective in Austria. With a selection of 150 paintings, collages, and sculptures, as well as impressive
examples of illustrated books and documents, the show will cover all of the artist’s periods, discoveries, and
techniques, while tracing his life and oeuvre in a biographic and historical context.
There is no doubt that Max Ernst ranks among the leading figures in twentieth-century art history, together
with Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Max Beckmann, Wassily Kandinsky, and Andy Warhol. He was an early
protagonist of Dadaism, a pioneer of Surrealism, and the deviser of such techniques as collage, frottage,
grattage, decalcomania, and oscillation, so that his oeuvre defies easily graspable definition. His inventiveness
in handling imagery and inspiration, the breaks marking his numerous creative phases, and his changing back
and forth between subjects cause irritation. What remains constant is the invariability of his contradiction.
Max Ernst
Beim ersten klaren Wort, 1923
Öl auf Gips, auf Leinwand übertragen
© VBK, Wien 2012 / K20 Kunstsammlung
Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf
Max Ernst
Vogeldenkmal, 1927
Öl auf Leinwand
© VBK, Wien 2012 / Musée Cantini, Marseille
Max Ernst
Napoleon in der Wildnis
Napoleon in the Wilderness, 1941
Öl auf Leinwand
© VBK, Wien 2012 / ©2012. Digital image, The
Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala,
Florence
Lewis Baltz
1 March– 2 June 2013
The landscape photographs by the US-American Lewis Baltz are characterized by deserted and frequently
devastated peripheries. In 1970s, he revolutionized fine-art photography with motifs that had previously not
been thought worth depicting, such as industrial buildings, suburban housing developments, and wasteland.
From March 2013, the Albertina will dedicate an exhibition comprising as many as several hundreds of
photographs to this artist, who was born in Newport Beach, California, in 1945. On display will be, among
other works, the famous series The Tract Houses (1971) and The New Industrial Parks Near Irvine (1973–75),
through which Baltz fundamentally reformed the genre of landscape photography, thereby addressing the
disastrous impact of technology on society in the twentieth century.
artistic influences that proved to be crucial for Lewis Baltz’s work. This contextualization is meant to present
the complexity of Lewis Baltz’s œuvre on the one hand and pay tribute to one of the most important
photographers of the second half of the twentieth century on the other.
Lewis Baltz
East Palo Alto, 1972
aus der Serie The Prototype Works
Albertina, Wien - Erworben mit Unterstützung der
Kunstsektion des Bundes (Galerienförderung)
Lewis Baltz
Santa Cruz (B), 1970
aus der Serie The Prototype Works
Albertina, Wien - Erworben mit Unterstützung der
Kunstsektion des Bundes (Galerienförderung)
Lewis Baltz
Southeast Corner, Semicoa, 333 McCormick, Costa Mesa,
1974, aus der Serie The New Industrial Parks Near Irvine,
California.
Albertina, Wien
Bosch Bruegel Rubens Rembrandt
Masterpieces of the Albertina
14 March – 30 June 2013
The Albertina houses an internationally significant inventory of Dutch drawings. Its centrepiece is formed by
the works of Hieronymus Bosch, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Peter Paul Rubens and Rembrandt Harmensz. van
Rijn, who together trace an arc from the late Middle Ages to the heyday of the Baroque. In this anniversary
exhibition ten years since the reopening of the museum, a first-class selection of over 150 foils will be
presented from the collection. The four artists and many other great masters from this epoch will accompany
us through two centuries of Dutch art that also led European art history to its climax.
A contemporary position complements and reflects the collection’s inventory: with his animated film and
drawings on the subject of Pieter Bruegel’s Seven Deadly Sins, the Belgian artist Antoine Roegiers (*1980) can
also be seen in the context of the exhibition.
Peter Paul Rubens
Nikolaus Rubens with Coral Necklace, around
1619
Black chalk, red chalk, accented with white
chalk
Albertina, Vienna
Pieter Bruegel the Elder
The Big Fish Eat the Small, 1556.
Pen and brush in grey and black, transfer lines
Albertina, Vienna
Hieronymus Bosch
Tree Man, circa 1505,
Pen with brown ink
Albertina, Vienna
Gottfried Helnwein
25 May– 13 October 2013
Gottfried Helnwein, born in Vienna in 1948 numbers among the internationally most well-known Austrian
artists. The Albertina will stage his hitherto largest retrospective in the German-speaking area.
Helnwein’s oeuvre is marked by a critical analysis of today’s society and its controversial themes and taboos.
Motifs constantly recurring in his work are children and the injured and maltreated human body. Gottfried
Helnwein became first known in Austria for his illustrations on the cover pages of news magazines and
posters and for his self-portraits depicting him with a bandaged head and wide-open mouth.
One of the show’s focal points will be on the artist’s early works – his watercolours, pastels, coloured pencil
and pen drawings. Moreover, the display will include such central groups of works as the monochrome series
Night and Righteous Men, which were done in Germany in the 1990s, and the series Paradise Burning, which
dates from Helnwein’s first years in the United States. More recent works to be on view will comprise Los
Caprichos, The Disasters of War and Murmur of the Innocents.
Gottfried Helnwein
Selbstporträt (BLACKOUT), 1982
Aquarell auf Karton
Christian Baha, Zürich
© VBK, Wien, 2012
Gottfried Helnwein
BEAUTIFUL VICTIM 1, 1974
Zeichnung, Aquarell auf Karton
Christian Baha, Zürich
© VBK, Wien, 2012
Gottfried Helnwein
Untitled (The Disasters of War 27), 2011
aus der Serie “Disasters of War”
mixed media (Öl und Acryl auf Leinwand)
Christian Baha, Zürich
© VBK, Wien, 2012
Gunter Damisch
19 June–22 September 2013
In the 1980s, Gunter Damisch (born in Steyr/Upper Austria in 1958) became known in the wake of the »Neue
Wilde« or »New Wild Ones«, a loose group of young artists responding to the internationally proclaimed
downfall of painting with expressive, colourful pictures. Within his extensive oeuvre, Damisch has conceived a
highly individual iconography and mythology that oscillates between figuration and abstraction and by which
he fathoms his pictorial worlds. Since 1998 the artist has held a professorship in printmaking at the Academy
of Fine Arts in Vienna. Within the framework of this exhibition, his recent production of monumental
woodcuts, monotypes, and printed collages will be on public view for the first time.
WELTFLÄMMLERORT (No. 3764)
200 x 125 cm, 2011
Woodcut, bled-off
Edition: 5 + 2EA, Arches handmade paper, 400g
Printed by Kurt Zein, Vienna
Series “UNIKATDRUCK” (No. 3786)
200 x 125 cm, 2010
Woodcut, bled-off, printed in two colours,
Arches handmade paper, 400g
Printed by Kurt Zein, Vienna
SMILEWELTWEG
200 x 117 cm, 2009
Woodcut, bled-off
Edition: 5 + 2EA, Arches handmade paper, 400g
Printed by Kurt Zein, Vienna
Matisse and the Fauves
20 September.2013 – 12 January 2014
In autumn 2013, the Albertina will be presenting approximately 140 works by Henri Matisse and the fauvists.
Most of the works by these young art contemporaries, whom art critics at the time compared to fauves (“wild
animals”) will be on display for the very first time in Vienna and central Europe.
Henri Matisse was the leader and mouthpiece of the fauvists. In autumn 1905, he and his fellow artists caused
uproar at the 3rd Autumn Paris Salon. The public was horrified by their intense, seemingly rapidly applied
brushstrokes and bright, multi-coloured paints. The motifs were secondary – what counted was their
expression.
Besides showing well-known paintings, the exhibition also demonstrates how Matisse and the fauvists also
strove for expression and intensity in their bronzes, ceramics, stone sculptures and furniture works. Fauvism,
represented chiefly by Henri Matisse, André Derain, Maurice de Vlaminck, Georges Braque and Kees van
Dongen, is regarded as the first avant-garde movement of the 20th century and was of groundbreaking
significance for the development of modernity.
André Derain
Waterloo Bridge, 1906
Oil on canvas
Madrid, Thyssen Museum
Henri Matisse
The Open Window, 1905
Oil on canvas
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Collection of Mr. and Mrs. John Hay Whitney
André Derain
The Pool of London, 1906/07
Oil on canvas
Tate: Presented by the Trustees of the Chantrey
Bequest 1951
The chiaroscuro woodcut of the 16th century
Masterpieces from
from the Georg Baselitz and Albertina collections
29 November.2013 – 16 February 2014
Around 160 works from the collection of the painter Georg Baselitz and the Albertina provide a vivid
illustration of the chiaroscuro woodcut in the 16th century. Particularly beautiful, rare and occasionally unique
prints will be on display. Early examples of the printing procedure, in which the black key block was
complemented by one or more coloured tone blocks, originate from Lucas Cranach and Hans Burgkmair. The
technique, which made it possible to achieve unique colour effects in graphic design for prints, was rapidly
adopted by the circle of artists around Dürer such as Baldung Grien and Hans Wechtlin as well as masters like
Albrecht Altdorfer. Other prominent representatives of the technique include Ugo da Carpi, Antonio da
Trento, Beccafumi and Hendrik Goltzius.
Ugo da Carpi
Diogenes
Chiaroscuro woodcut in four plates (green)
Georg Baselitz Collection
Hans Burgkmair, Portrait of Hans Baumgartner
Domenico Beccafumi, also called Il Mecarino
The Apostle
Chiaroscuro woodcut in three plates (blue)
Georg Baselitz Collection