Wonderland

Wonderland

7 May – 19 September 2021

The third exhibition at ALBERTINA modern draws from the ALBERTINA MUSEUM’s rich collection holdings. The selection of works, divided into seven chapters, encompasses over 100 masterpieces by artists ranging from Andy Warhol to Roy Liechtenstein, Anselm Kiefer to Katharina Grosse, Ad Reinhardt to Cecily Brown, Marc Quinn to Erwin Wurm, and Albert Oehlen to Markus Schinwald. This presentation reflects the broad spectrum of post-1945 contemporary art present in all collections of the ALBERTINA MUSEUM and features various thematic emphases in the individual display areas: from pop art and its contemporary offshoots (Tom Wesselmann, Andy Warhol, Alex Katz) to abstract expressionist painting (Cecily Brown, Katharina Grosse, Wolfgang Hollegha) and on to a conspectus of the great German painters (Georg Baselitz, A. R. Penck, Anselm Kiefer, Jörg Immendorff, Markus Lüpertz). Works by Georg Baselitz, who turned the art world on its head and is now in his 80s, are juxtaposed with the output of Maria Lassnig. And finally, the banner of anarchic anti-art is held high by enfants terribles such as Gelatin and Franz West. Wonderland: the title of a painting by Fiona Rae. A painting that reveals to us in one fell swoop a universe of the unimaginable and mad. Alice in Wonderland, that famous book by Lewis Carroll, reminds us that believing the impossible is simply a question of practice. Armed with an imagination thus unleashed, the exhibition Wonderland sets off into uncharted worlds. The utopia of a successful life replete with bliss collides with bare, dystopian landscapes where isolation and loneliness, melancholy, cruelty, and death reign supreme. Beyond just individual paintings, this exhibition as a whole sweeps us into a wonderland in which our present’s past encounters its own future. Klaus Albrecht Schröder