Museumsticket für die Albertina
Albertina
Wien
Austria
Ticket for the ALBERTINA Museum
CHILDREN AND ADOLESCENTS (up to 19 years) free
Admission to all exhibitions on the day of visit
Valid for use until Dec31, 2010
Exhibitions 2010
*Alex Katz - Prints
28.5. - 19.9.2010
Alex Katz Prints, presented by the Albertina from May 28 to September 12, 2010, offers a major survey of the artist’s printed works. In autumn 2009 Katz donated his complete graphic oeuvre to the Albertina. The exhibition shows a representative selection of it, with works dating from the 1960s to the present. T he show comprises about 150 prints, cut-outs (painted or printed aluminum silhouettes), and artist books. Born in New York in 1927, Alex Katz ranks among today’s most important US artists.
Based on the Abstract Expressionist idea of the all-over, Alex Katz pursued an original approach of representational painting before the emergence of Minimalism and Pop Art. Besides the exploration of the classical avant-gardes and commercial art’s formal reductionism, the French Nabis of the early twentieth century, the American realists of the years between World War I and World War II, and, not least, direct portrait and nature studies are to be regarded as the cornerstones of Katz’s art.
Since the exhibition Birth of the Cool (shown in Hamburg and Zurich in 1997) at the latest, Alex Katz has been considered the key figure of a self-reflective US tradition of painting characterized by a unison of rationality, sensuality, and abstraction. Turning them into icons, as it were, the artist renders ostensibly passionless motifs from the New York intellectual scene and art world as well as the well-off leisure-oriented society in monumental formats. Another emphasis lies on the depiction of idyllic landscapes of Maine, in the Northeast of the United States, which radiate both immediacy and an air of aloofness.
*Heinrich Kühn - Die vollkommene Fotografie
9.6. - 5.9.2010
Using the photographic picture for realizing an artistic vision as precisely and creatively as in painting or drawing was the lifetime objective of Heinrich Kühn, a central founding father of international art photography around 1900. Thanks to him and his friends, the stylized photograph became as much an element of the Secessionists’ efforts for a gesamtkunstwerk as the art of interior design, clothes, or commercial art. The most important method for Kühn’s purposes was a printing process based on gum bichromate: as it granted complete freedom in the choice of paper and pigments, the prints from the photographic negative resembled charcoal drawings or etchings rather than conventional photographs. Contrasts of brightness could be precisely adapted to the idea Kühn had of a picture, and its sharpness, which was regarded as extraneous to art, reduced at will.
*Walton Ford
18.6. - 10.10.2010
The work of the American artist Walton Ford (born in 1960) will be presented by the Albertina for the first time in Austria in an exhibition on show as of June 18, 2010. The presentation comprises 22 large-format works by the artist from the last ten years.
All of Ford’s works radiate something disconcerting and eerie: a wild turkey crushing a little parrot between its claws, a horde of monkeys devastating a laid table, a buffalo surrounded by a pack of bloodstained wolves amidst a well-kept French garden. Ford’s technique of painting relies on the proven method of the scientific draftsman. As irritating in their style as bewildering in their contents, his works breathe an oppressing familiarity. With titles such as “An Encounter with Du Chaillu,” “Borodino,” “The Sensorium,” or “Royal Menagerie at the Tower of London,” his drawings blur the dividing line between man and animal and push open the door to a realm of fantasies, dreams, and nightmares.
*Picasso - Peace and freedom
22.9.2010 - 16.1.2011
*Michelangelo
8.10.2010 - 9.1.2011
*William Kentridge - Fünf Themen
29.10.2010 - 30.1.2011
