Karl Anton Fleck

The ALBERTINA Museum is devoting a wide-ranging, approximately 90-work exhibition to Karl Anton Fleck (1928–1983). Most of the presented drawings are from the collection of Dagmar und Manfred Chobot, who acquired this Austrian artist’s entire artistic estate in 1987. The Fleck estate constituted a large part of the donation that the Chobots made to the ALBERTINA Museum in 2019.

The present exhibition focuses on multiple themes within Karl Anton Fleck’s oeuvre: while he employed an abstract, art informel-inspired visual language during the early 1960s, he then began including more and more figural elements, resulting in surreal compositions of body- and object-fragments that in some cases took up impulses from pop art. Fleck’s critical attitude toward Western consumerism becomes clear in a series of still-lifes whose titles allude to themes such as overabundance and obsessions with dieting. He also frequently created “recipe poems” by combining text—done in his characteristic printed lettering—and images. During the 1970s, the artist increasingly portrayed himself as a hybrid being between animal and human, giving rise to a rich, mainly drawn oeuvre in which the (self-)portrait played an increasingly central role.

The collection of Dagmar and Manfred Chobot numbers among the most important donations made to the ALBERTINA in recent years. The work of the Chobot Gallery, founded in 1971, and this collector-couple relates closely to post-1945 Austrian contemporary art. Even in their early days as collectors, the Chobots had a future handover to the ALBERTINA in mind—which took place in 2019, some 50 years after they had founded their gallery. Dagmar and Manfred Chobot ultimately made the ALBERTINA Museum a generous gift of nearly 800 works.

On view at the ALBERTINA MODERN Museum from 18 November until 22 January 2023.