From Hundertwasser to Kiefer

ALBERTINA KLOSTERNEUBURG

Around the middle of the 20th century, abstraction rose to become a symbol of freedom in both Europa and America. This supposedly final style of art history was viewed as a new worldwide language of art, as painting’s climax and culmination. It came to epitomize the artistic temperament, expressive subjectivity, and heroization of the individual—in contrast to the propaganda embodied by representational art, the expressive form of dictatorships from National Socialism to Stalinism.

Abstract painting was the answer to this realism in service of propagandistic aims. Abstraction, which amounted to the existential self-expression of the artist, grew out of a refusal to adhere to formal and artistic laws and rules. The fact that a nonconforming abstract artist can become popular and even downright folkloric was proven in Austria by Friedensreich Hundertwasser, who was active both as a painter and as an architect.

During the 1960s, however, German artists—from Jörg Immendorff to Markus Lüpertz and on to Anselm Kiefer—began to grapple with the catastrophe of the world wars that Germany had twice visited upon the world: it was hence the shadows of a dark past that reintroduced identifiable objects, themes, and motifs to art. These painters employed representation not as propaganda but as criticism of their own history—of war, of Germany’s division, and of society’s atomization.

While American pop art of the 1960s dealt mainly with the consequences of capitalism and the commercialization of society and consumer goods, Georg Baselitz, Jörg Immendorff, and Markus Lüpertz turned their gazes upon their own nation’s ominous past.

On view from 10 April until 3 November at the ALBERTINA KLOSTERNEUBURG museum in Klosterneuburg.

EXHIBITION PROGRAM 

Public guided tours (in German)
Learn about highlights and backgrounds of the exhibition in a one-hour guided tour of the exhibition.
Dates & tickets

For private or school tours, please contact our Art Education Department on weekdays between 9:00 am and 4:00 pm at +43 1 534 83 540 or