In addition to the highlights from the Picture Gallery's collection - from Bosch to Rubens - the "Viewing the Collection..." format introduced in 2023 will also feature works that relate to the recently introduced insert format. These include, for example, Pieter de Hooch's Portrait of a Delft Family and Dice-Playing Boys by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo. In the inserts, contemporary artists engage with the Academy's historical art collections. The Austrian artist Klaus Scherübel, who lives in Montreal, was invited as the second in the series.
Based on his installations situated in the museological genre of the Period Room and other conceptually related works in which aspects of the image, publication, sculpture, architecture and the dispositive of the exhibition enter into a relationship with one another, Klaus Scherübel's current project for the Kunstsammlungen deals with the mode of representation of space and architecture in connection with questions of artistic self-representation and strategies of productivity using the example of a work by Lucas Cranach the Elder, one of the most important painters of the German Renaissance and Reformation.
Klaus Scherübel, Untitled (The Artist at Work) # 1, 1994, Photo: Helmut Gausterer
Scherübel focuses specifically on the painting The Holy Kinship (1510/1512) from the Gemäldegalerie's collection, which Cranach created on the occasion of his marriage to the patrician's daughter Barbara Brengbier. Due to its design with strong portrait-like features, the painting is considered in art history to be a special form of a subject that was practiced until the 17th century. In it, Cranach depicts himself, his wife and his father-in-law in the roles of members of the holy clan. Apart from the unorthodox interweaving of these two family portraits, in which religious themes overlap with real social relationships and interests, Scherübel is particularly interested in the architectural "framing" and the setting in which the "holy clan" is placed. Among other things, this raises the question of whether and in what way these can be linked to the specific context in which the painting was created and Cranach's mercantile image production.
June 26, 2024 to February 16, 2025
www.kunstsammlungenakademie.at
