Heinrich Kühn

With Heinrich Kühn. The Perfect Photograph the Albertina presents this photographer’s hitherto most comprehensive retrospective in the world in summer 2010. Conceived by the Albertina curators Dr. Monika Faber and Dr. Astrid Mahler, the show comprises about 150 exhibits, among them several important work groups from the holdings of the Albertina. Thanks to the curators’ longstanding research on the subject, Kühn’s oeuvre can now be positioned within a broad context for the first time. After being presented in Vienna, the exhibition is shown in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris and in the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas.

Kühn’s unique photographic oeuvre between Post-Impressionism and Vienna Art Nouveau’s two-dimensional art has remained unknown even to experts in its entire range.

It is the artistic form that permitted the photographer to achieve a harmony encompassing all conflicting aspects in his pictures. This focus of the photographic artistic leeds on formal possibilities led Kühn from the art of rendering atmospheres toward the boundaries of the representational and narrative.