The Wounded World

ALBERTINA KLOSTERNEUBURG

"Life is a wound, and this wound is slow to heal.”
- Marianne Fritz

It was with this bitter and painful insight that the Austrian author Marianne Fritz, writing in 1978, described The Weight of Things at the end of World War Two. In the fate of this novel’s anti-heroine, driven to commit the most extreme act—child murder—by the stifling and claustrophobic atmosphere of the immediate postwar period, we recognize a world in which there is no space for outsiders, for those buffeted by their era’s dysfunctional circumstances.

Living in a wounded world: humankind, in its finite existence threatened by illness and death, is the collective bearer of those wounds that society inflicts upon individuals.

The images of a stricken world shown us by art range from Franz West’s vain strivings of Sisyphus, Virgilius Moldovan’s punishing hand of God, and Fritz Wotruba’s civil war suffering to the deadly AIDS epidemic, the crimes of the US Army at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison, the charred corpses of Auschwitz, the refugee crisis, and whistleblowers / enemies of the state such as Julian Assange and Edward Snowden.

They bear witness to art’s unflinching and steadfast gaze upon war, destruction, illness, misery, and death.

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