Max Ernst

The ALBERTINA Museum will devote an exhibition – his first retrospective in Austria – to Max Ernst, the great pictorial inventor. Presenting a selection of 180 paintings, collages, and sculptures, as well as relevant examples of illustrated books and documents, the exhibition will assemble works related to all of the artist’s periods, discoveries, and techniques, thereby introducing his life and oeuvre within a both biographic and historical context.

Remembrance, discovery, recycling, and collage were the combined motor that drove him in his work.  Under these aspects, the exhibition positions Max Ernst’s oeuvre between references to the past, contemporary political events, and a prophetic and visionary perspective of the future. He who attested to himself a “virginity complex” in the face of empty canvases went always in search of means that would allow him to augment the hallucinatory capacities of his mind, so that visions would arise automatically in order to “rid him of his blindness”.

This exhibition is being compiled in collaboration with the Fondation Beyeler.
Guest curators: Werner Spies and Julia Drost