From newly carved portraits of emperors and castrated statues to mutilated female bodies and erased inscriptions. At the end of 2024, the Glyptotek will open the special exhibition Iconoclasm - Art as a Battlefield.
For thousands of years, people have destroyed art to challenge the established order of things and to highlight religious changes and differences. Using the museum's impressive collection of ancient artifacts, the exhibition sheds light on man's turbulent relationship with art and explores what motivates us to destroy it.
The emotional, sometimes even violent interaction with the works on display in the exhibition shows that even in antiquity, art was a battleground for power struggles and a place where identities were negotiated. Iconoclasm not only presents works from the Glyptotek's own collections, but also from the British Museum in London, the Vatican Museum in Rome and the Altes Museum in Berlin.
The exhibition is accompanied by a richly illustrated catalog with contributions from international experts. The catalog can be purchased after publication in the museum store or in the webshop.
November 21, 2024 to May 18, 2025
