This Kunstkammer exhibition brings together for the first time all extant works by the anonymous artist known as the Master of Heiligenkreuz. In 1926, the Kunsthistorisches Museum acquired the seminal work of a painter regarded as one of the most extraordinary and mysterious artists active at the turn of the fifteenth century in Austria: recently restored, the inner panels of the diptych from Cistercian abbey of Heiligenkreuz (in the environs of Vienna) depict, respectively, the Annunciation and the Mystical Marriage of Saint Catherine.
The photographer Helmut Wimmer has been working with the Ganymede series in the Kunsthistorisches Museum for many years, producing sensitive and exciting portraits of the authors involved. For GANYMEDE NATURE he has let nature burst into the museum and its galleries. Comprising twelve tableaus, his photographic project The Last Day is inspired by historical facts and natural catastrophes: In the most poetical sense, Nature herself takes centre stage. Earth and water make their way through the galleries. Mountains take possession of the rooms. Leaves and shady groves cover ancient busts. A visual dialogue between two contrary worlds takes spectators on a journey in which violence and anger, memory and accusations are as palpable as pausing to think, and forgiveness. Nature as a space for civilisation and history. The museum competing with the forces of nature.
Kunsthistorisches Museum presents for the first time in Austria an exhibition dedicated to the great American artist, Mark Rothko. Together with his contemporaries, Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, and Willem de Kooning, Rothko was one of the Abstract Expressionists, whose works made New York a centre of modern art. Rothko undertook three extensive trips to Europe, visiting as many churches, architectural monuments, and museums as he could. Art and architecture of the recent and more distant past are a vigorous presence in his work. Our exhibition presents an overview of Rothko’s artistic career from the early figurative works of the 1930s to those of the 1940s, and the classical abstract paintings of the 1950s and 1960s that made him famous.