BOECKL / JOSEPHSOHN: EXCITING ART DIALOGUE AT THE LEOPOLD MUSEUM
24.07.2026
THE EXHIBITION FEATURES SELECT MASTERPIECES BY THE PAINTER BOECKL AND THE SCULPTOR JOSEPHSOHN SIDE BY SIDE
In this exhibition, conceived as a dialogue, the works of two eminent representatives of Modernism, the Austrian painter Herbert Boeckl (1894–1966) and the Swiss sculptor Hans Josephsohn (1920–2012), are juxtaposed for the first time. Featuring more than 80 objects from the areas of painting, sculpture and graphic art, the exhibition explores questions of form, figure, material accumulation and human existence.
“An encounter between two artists working in such different categories necessitates an experimental process which affords new insights into their respective genres. This dialogue, highlighting the elective affinity between them, opens up new spaces for associative interpretations and allows for fresh perspectives on their works’ form and content, while emphasizing their quest to transform the fleetingness of human existence into a lasting, universal and timeless form.”
Hans-Peter Wipplinger, Director of the Leopold Museum and curator of the exhibition
This unusual juxtaposition, at the point of intersection between painting and sculpture, allows us to see the work of two eminent artists in a completely new light. The oeuvres of both artists, which were invariably dominated by representationalism, enrich one another, despite all the historical, spatial and cultural differences between them. Both Boeckl and Josephsohn based their artistic work on their personal environment and on concrete models. Boeckl’s most important muse was his wife Maria who often modeled for him. Josephsohn also preferred people close to him as inspiring models, among them his first wife Mirjam Abeles, his partner Ruth Jacob and his second wife Verena Wunderlin. He would further base works on friends and strangers who piqued his curiosity, such as the laborer Ernst Baumann. Both artists eluded the trends and fashions of the art scene. While Boeckl was part of the art network of his time, Josephsohn was an artistic loner. His work was first represented by a gallery in 2000, when the artist was already 80 years old. Today, Hans Josephsohn is considered the second most important Swiss sculptor after Alberto Giacometti.
Archaic Art as a Reference
The objects shown in the exhibition – paintings and works on paper by Boeckl which enter into a dialogue with Josephsohn’s plaster and brass sculptures – provide a consonance of works full of surprising formal-esthetical analogies. Both artists participated in a reception esthetics inspired by pre-modern, classical and medieval visual programs. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Josephsohn explored the reduction of the human figure. Based on the models, he simplified the bodies into compact, block-like forms. The resulting archaic-looking, reduced and stele-like figures evoke associations with Egyptian, Greek and Etruscan sculptures.
The Effect of Paint and Form
Though Boeckl’s early oeuvre boasts formal elements reminiscent of Schiele and Kokoschka, he increasingly emancipated his art from these influences from 1920 onwards through a distinctive “elementary effect of paint”, as the art historian Fritz Novotny put it. Both Boeckl and Josephsohn appreciated the works of Cezanne and of the sculptor Aristide Maillol, especially the latter’s reduction of his figures to the formal cohesiveness of the human body. Just as the contours in Boeckl’s work gradually disappeared, Josephsohn, too, increasingly dissolved the shapes in his sculptures. Time and again, the works of the two artists reveal fascinating analogies: While Boeckl’s landscapes look like bodies, Josephsohn’s sculptures of reclining figures appear like monumental mountain ranges.
Paint Masses and Reshaping
Boeckl’s key work from the collection of the Leopold Museum, the painting Group at the Edge of the Wood (1920), in which the artist depicted himself alongside his young wife Maria, boasts a radical late Expressionism. Owing to the application of extremely thick paint layers, his paintings from this period look like reliefs. While Boeckl layered paint masses in his paintings, Josephsohn reshaped human anatomy in his sculptures. Boeckl treated paint like a malleable mass, at times squeezing it directly from the tube onto the image carrier to mold his figures. Josephsohn proceeded in a similar manner with his three-dimensional compositions which he created as plaster models in his studio in Zurich. In his Portrait of Josef von Wertheimstein (1921), perhaps Boeckl’s most radical likeness, he reduced the depicted to very few pictorial elements. The figure stands out against the darkness of the pastose background as if it had emerged from the viscous primeval mud. Josephsohn, too, was interested in grasping the model as a whole rather than in the true rendering of a person’s appearance.
The Search for a New Visual Language
The unspeakable horrors of World War II shook the art world to its core, and made it impossible for artists to continue with traditional forms of representation. Boeckl responded to this humanitarian catastrophe with his “metamorphoses” which heralded a new period in his oeuvre. Informed by abstract experiments, he searched for a new visual language, systematically dissecting his objects into planes and blotches of paint. Between 1951 and 1953, Josephsohn created heavily abstracted and geometrically reduced planar reliefs in connection with the Korean War which had awakened his own traumas sustained during World War II. In his late oeuvre, Josephsohn started a renewed process of abstraction. Instead of reducing his figures, he now chose to reshape them by building up material. He scaled back anatomical details, individual characteristics and natural proportions in favor of an archetypical form language.
Timeless Forms
Both artists consolidated recollections, encounters and fleeting moments of deep realization into timeless forms. The lives of Boeckl and Josephsohn were shaped by the profound upheaval of the 20th century. Boeckl experienced the horrors of World War I as a young man, while Josephsohn, the son of Jewish parents who were murdered in concentration camps, was forced to flee via Italy to Switzerland to escape the persecution by the National Socialists. Though Josephsohn always rejected a biographical interpretation of his oeuvre in the context of the Shoah, the experiences of war, loss and life-threatening events left their mark on him, as they did on Boeckl.
Catalogue Accompanying the Exhibition
The exhibition, curated by the Leopold Museum’s Director Hans-Peter Wipplinger, is accompanied by an extensive catalogue, issued with the publishing house Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König, in German and English, featuring essays by Matthias Boeckl, Lili-Vienne Debus, Ulrich Meinherz and Hans-Peter Wipplinger.
Atmospheric Opening Celebrations
The atmospheric exhibition opening, hosted by Director Hans-Peter Wipplinger, was attended by some 700 guests, among them the Leopold Museum board members Josef Ostermayer and Danielle Spera, the contributors to the catalogue Matthias Boeckl, Ulrich Meinherz (Kesselhaus Josephsohn) and Lili-Vienne Debus (Leopold Museum), numerous members of the Boeckl family – from Austria, Germany and the US – and of the Josephsohn family from Switzerland, Felix Lehner (Galerie Felix Lehner, Kesselhaus Josephsohn, St. Gallen), the CEO of im Kinsky and sponsor of the exhibition Ernst Ploil, Bernd Ernsting (chairman LETTER Stiftung), the artists Martha Jungwirth, Peter Kogler, Gerda Leopold, Robert Comploij, Rudi Molacek, Peter Baldinger and Walter Vopava, Stella Rollig (CEO Belvedere) and artist Peter Hauenschild, Florian Steininger (director of the Kunsthalle Krems), Angela Baillou (CEO Christie’s Vienna), Christoph Thun-Hohenstein (former director of MAK), Susanna Tabaka-Pillhofer and Jan Tabaka, Karl and Johanna Arco, Katharina Husslein, Waltraud Leopold, architects Andrea Frank and Alexander Serda, gallery owners Hella Pohl (senior international director Thaddaeus Ropac), Julius Hummel (Galerie Hummel), Maximilian Thomann (Galerie Thomann) and Andrea Jünger (Galerie Jünger), Barbara Potisk-Eibensteiner (CFO of Post AG), Harald Friedrich (LLB Österreich), Barbara Friedrich (Raiffeisen), entrepreneurs Gallus Pesendorfer and Georg Stradiot, attorney Thomas Angermair (DORDA), attorney Niklas Schmidt (Wolf Theiss), attorney Kathrin Weber and attorney Axel Anderl, attorney Christian Dorda, Peter Kriemler and Albert Kriemler (AKRIS), art historians Birgitte Borchhardt-Birbaumer, Christoph Becker (former director of Kunsthaus Zürich), Dieter Ronte (former director of Mumok) and Thomas Zaunschirm, Claudia Mörth-Gasser (expert at the auctioneers im Kinsky), Belvedere curators Katharina Lovecky and Franz Smola, Sylvia Eisenburger, attorney Sascha Solomonowitz and collector Mimi Eisenberger, the collectors Elisabeth and Christian Burghardt, collector Harald Spengler (Kunstparterre München), Lothar Trierenberg (entrepreneur, owner of Villa Beer), Philipp Breicha, Jakob Jelinek and Jürgen Pölzl (Salon Leopold Committee), Elisabeth Vogl-Pillhofer, Britt Schnecker (Kunsttrans), Mark Alexander Grübbeling (Salon Leopold), diplomats Helene von Damm and Wolfgang Petritsch, collector Edith Raidl, graphic designer Nele Steinborn, coiffeur Erich Joham, Peter Grundmann (Hearonymus), author and journalist Hans-Peter Schwanke, and many others.
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