Carl Spitzweg and Erwin Wurm: Exhibition finale at the Leopold Museum

14.06.2017

Successful exhibition open until 10 pm on 19^th June

The exhibition “Carl Spitzweg—Erwin Wurm. Hilarious! Hilarious?”, already clearly set to be one of the most successful presentations in the history of the Leopold Museum, concludes this coming Monday.

Gabriele Langer, the Managing Director of the Leopold Museum: “Since the exhibition’s opening on 25^th March, more than 100,000 visitors have witnessed the extraordinary encounter between these two masters of subtle humor. The exhibition thus follows in the footsteps of highly frequented presentations such as ‘Klimt – Up Close and Personal’. Celebrating the exhibition’s finale, we will extend our opening times – on Monday, 19^th June 2017, the last day of the exhibition, the museum will remain open until 10 pm.”

The Leopold Museum’s Artistic Director Hans-Peter Wipplinger believes that the presentation’s great success is testament to the “timeless topicality of Carl Spitzweg’s oeuvre. Trenchant humor, razor-sharp powers of observation and inimitable renderings of comical moments are the common denominators of the works created by Carl Spitzweg and Erwin Wurm.”  

Some 130 years after Spitzweg’s death, the exhibition “Carl Spitzweg—Erwin Wurm” presents the oeuvre of one of the most popular German painters for the first time in Austria. The comprehensive exhibition, which features some 100 paintings, graphic works and book illustrations, focuses explicitly on those aspects of Spitzweg’s oeuvre that were critical of his time and the society he lived in, and with which he documented the schisms and conflicts of his times. Themes addressed by Spitzweg, such as surveillance, monitoring, justice and injustice, compulsive orderliness, threats to artistic freedom, the discrepancy between the inner and outer world, the relationship between science and nature as well as (suppressed) libido, were as topical in the Biedermeier era as they are today for the 21^st century’s “Generation Biedermeier”. This is illustrated at the Leopold Museum by means of 15 precisely placed interventions by Erwin Wurm (born in 1954), in which humor is “deployed as a weapon”. Among them are the works “Narrow House”, which is shown for the first time in Vienna, the oversized potato (“Home”) and his “Self-Portrait as Pickle”.

The exhibition “Carl Spitzweg—Erwin Wurm. Hilarious! Hilarious?” will be on display up to and including Monday, 19^th June.

Also currently shown at the Leopold Museum are the first comprehensive retrospective exhibition dedicated to the Greek-Austrian sculptor Joannis Avramidis, the Festwochen exhibition “The Conundrum of Imagination. On the Paradigm of Exploration and Discovery”, which will be on display until Sunday, 18^th June, as well as the permanent presentations of the collection “Egon Schiele. Self-Abandonment and Self-Assertion” as well as “Vienna 1900” featuring a range of works from Gustav Klimt, Koloman Moser and the Wiener Werkstätte to Oskar Kokoschka and Albin Egger-Lienz.

Opening times: 10 am to 6 pm daily, Thursdays till 9 pm; Monday, 19^th June: 10 am to 10 pm

Guided tours giving an overview of the exhibition: Thursday, 15^th June at 3 pm and Sunday, 18^th June at 3 pm.

Back