1960 - PRESENT
To mark its assumption of the Ploner Collection, the Albertina is mounting an exhibition (10.06.2015 - 06.09.2015) on the development of abstract painting and drawing in Austria since 1960. This presentation sets a selection of the newly received works in relation to selected drawings and paintings from the Albertina’s extensive related holdings.
The collection, which Heinz Ploner began compiling in 1997, lends additional depth to the museum’s existing inventory with outstanding works by Erwin Bohatsch, Herbert Brandl, Gunter Damisch, Josef Mikl, Hubert Scheibl, and others. Equal status is accorded to graphic art and painting, quite in keeping with a principle that is also central to the Albertina’s collecting policy.
With its around 130 works, the exhibition will present the most important aspects of abstract art’s development in Austria from 1960 up to the present:
In the works of Josef Mikl, the abstraction of the human figure stands at the beginning of radical developments that would subsequently be carried forward by artists such as Jürgen Messensee and Hans Staudacher, who proceeded to translate and transform its natural appearance consistently and ever further.
Silhouettes of figures are likewise to be seen in the works by Gunter Damisch, although Damisch also supplements them with vegetative elements from his diverse formal vocabulary, their ornamental characteristics pointing the way into complete abstraction.
And a radical departure from the figurative is accomplished in the works by Erwin Bohatsch, Hubert Scheibl, and Herbert Brandl: their intense experiments with colour and materials deal both with the alternation between surface and visual depth and with drawing and painting as gestural acts. (Text: Albertina Vienna)