A walk in the fall, an ancient epic and a global crisis - these are the ingredients Belgian artist Ana Torfs uses to create her latest work The Day You Were Thinking About the Sibyl While You Were Picking Autumn Leaves. The 28-part cycle of jacquard tapestries can now be seen for the first time as part of the exhibition series "Die Sammlung betrachten & An Insert by..." in the art collections of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.

The series "An Insert by..." is an invitation to contemporary artists to enter into a dialog with the Academy's historical collection. Following the previous contributions, Torfs' installation is the third intervention - an encounter between past and present, between baroque painting and contemporary textile reflection.
The starting point for her work was reading Virgil's Aeneid during the pandemic isolation. When collecting autumn leaves, Torfs thinks of the Sibyl of Cumae, the mythical seer who wrote her prophecies on leaves - prophecies that were tossed about by the wind. Torfs develops her own visual language from this poetic parable: she dries the leaves between the pages of international newspapers, photographs the arrangements and then has them transferred into large-format tapestries, supplemented by short, anaphoric lines of text - personal fragments of thought, fragile commentaries on the state of the world.

Ana Torfs,The Day You Were Thinking About the Sibyl While You Were Picking Autumn Leaves, detail of a tapestry, 2020-2025. In cooperation with TextielLab, Tilburg © Photo: Ana Torfs, 2025

The result is a delicate web of nature, language and history. Torfs' works deal with the question of how orientation can still be gained in the age of digital floods of information. Like the Sibylline leaves, fragments of news and thoughts are set in motion by external forces - their order remains fragile, their meaning ambiguous. The result is a "lyrical tableau" that oscillates between private sentiment and global uncertainty.
Torfs' insert is accompanied by historical paintings from the Academy's art collections and loans from the Kunsthistorisches Museum, which illuminate the motif of the Sibyl in different eras. This juxtaposition opens up new perspectives on the depiction of female prophecy - between inspiration and skepticism, authority and ambivalence.

Giuseppe Maria Crespi, gen. Lo Spagnuolo, Aeneas, the Sibyl and Charon, c. 1695/1697, Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna, Picture Gallery © KHM-Museumsverband

The exhibition is part of the series Looking at the Collection, which presents works from the Baroque period and the Vienna Academy around 1800: from Anthonis van Dyck's Self-Portrait to Murillo's Dice-Playing Boys and Rachel Ruysch's Flower Piece. Between these old masters, Torfs' tapestries unfold a subtle tension - as a reflection of the present, woven into the historical resonance space of the collection. The cycle of works was produced in collaboration with the TextielLab of the Dutch Textielmuseum Tilburg - a place where precision craftsmanship and digital technology intertwine. This combination reflects Torfs' artistic approach: the continuous translation of text into image, of past into present, of thought into material.
With The Day You Were Thinking About the Sibyl While You Were Picking Autumn Leaves, she succeeds in creating a poetic meditation on perception, memory and fear of the future - an invitation to stand still amidst the noise of the present and trace the threads of history.
October 3, 2025 to August 30, 2026
www.kunstsammlungenakademie.at