Dear Friends of the Art Collections of the Academy!
I hope you’ve had a pleasant summer and that you’ve come through the recent flooding unscathed. I’d like to let you know about various measures that have been taken to further refine the quality of your exhibition experience and also makes us a more climate-friendly museum.
Firstly, improvements have been made to the lighting infrastructure in the Paintings Gallery. The installation of a new daylight control system and a full transition to LED ensure balanced lighting and the best possible protection of the works on show. In addition, these improvements have led to lower ambient temperatures, meaning less need for air-conditioning, thus also reducing emissions and energy costs.
We’ve made a big step forward concerning visibility, accessibility and searchability, as much of the material from our collections is now viewable online, including almost the whole of the Paintings Gallery Collection, 450 sculptures from the Plaster Cast Collection, and around 8,000 of the works from the Graphic Collection (of a total of over 100,000). This is the long-overdue launch of a process to digitize the collections in full over the coming years. We are delighted to be able to invite you to browse our treasures at Online Collections.
Following the international success of the exhibition History Tales. Fact and Fiction in History Painting, that was accompanied by a major publication, in June we opened Considering the Collection & Cranach’s Holy Productivity An Insert by Klaus Scherübel. With a focus on Cranach among other artists, this presentation of highlights from the Paintings Gallery Collection is accompanied by an insert by Montreal-based Austrian artist Klaus Scherübel.
In his insert, Klaus Scherübel deals with The Holy Kinship (1510–1512) from the collection of the Paintings Gallery, created by Cranach on the occasion of his marriage to Barbara Brengbier, the daughter of a patrician family. Owing to its strongly portrait-like character, art historians categorize this painting as a special form of a motif that was common until the seventeenth century: Cranach portrays himself, his wife and his father-in-law in the roles of members of the Holy Kinship. Apart from this unorthodox interweaving of the two family portraits, in which religious themes overlap with real social relations and interests, Scherübel focusses above all on the architectural setting within which the Holy Kinship is placed. For the exhibition, a spectacular large-scale installation, Cranach’s Holy Productivity VOL. 28, was realized as a kind of stage on which the architectural elements that provide the setting in the painting are examined closely and translated into a three-dimensional version with a new cast of characters – the exhibition visitors! From October to January, there will be a number of lectures on various aspects of the materials dealt with in the exhibition, as part of the series Lektionen / Lessons.
I’ll be back in touch in December with news of next year’s programme.
We look forward to welcoming you to the Paintings Gallery soon!
Yours,
Sabine Folie
Director
and the whole team at the Art Collections of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna
I hope you’ve had a pleasant summer and that you’ve come through the recent flooding unscathed. I’d like to let you know about various measures that have been taken to further refine the quality of your exhibition experience and also makes us a more climate-friendly museum.
Firstly, improvements have been made to the lighting infrastructure in the Paintings Gallery. The installation of a new daylight control system and a full transition to LED ensure balanced lighting and the best possible protection of the works on show. In addition, these improvements have led to lower ambient temperatures, meaning less need for air-conditioning, thus also reducing emissions and energy costs.
We’ve made a big step forward concerning visibility, accessibility and searchability, as much of the material from our collections is now viewable online, including almost the whole of the Paintings Gallery Collection, 450 sculptures from the Plaster Cast Collection, and around 8,000 of the works from the Graphic Collection (of a total of over 100,000). This is the long-overdue launch of a process to digitize the collections in full over the coming years. We are delighted to be able to invite you to browse our treasures at Online Collections.
Following the international success of the exhibition History Tales. Fact and Fiction in History Painting, that was accompanied by a major publication, in June we opened Considering the Collection & Cranach’s Holy Productivity An Insert by Klaus Scherübel. With a focus on Cranach among other artists, this presentation of highlights from the Paintings Gallery Collection is accompanied by an insert by Montreal-based Austrian artist Klaus Scherübel.
In his insert, Klaus Scherübel deals with The Holy Kinship (1510–1512) from the collection of the Paintings Gallery, created by Cranach on the occasion of his marriage to Barbara Brengbier, the daughter of a patrician family. Owing to its strongly portrait-like character, art historians categorize this painting as a special form of a motif that was common until the seventeenth century: Cranach portrays himself, his wife and his father-in-law in the roles of members of the Holy Kinship. Apart from this unorthodox interweaving of the two family portraits, in which religious themes overlap with real social relations and interests, Scherübel focusses above all on the architectural setting within which the Holy Kinship is placed. For the exhibition, a spectacular large-scale installation, Cranach’s Holy Productivity VOL. 28, was realized as a kind of stage on which the architectural elements that provide the setting in the painting are examined closely and translated into a three-dimensional version with a new cast of characters – the exhibition visitors! From October to January, there will be a number of lectures on various aspects of the materials dealt with in the exhibition, as part of the series Lektionen / Lessons.
I’ll be back in touch in December with news of next year’s programme.
We look forward to welcoming you to the Paintings Gallery soon!
Yours,
Sabine Folie
Director
and the whole team at the Art Collections of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna