Considering the Collection & Cranach’s Holy Productivity An Insert by Klaus Scherübel
Established in 2023, “Considering the Collection & An Insert by …” is a format presenting highlights from the collection of the Paintings Gallery of the Academy of Fine Arts, ranging from Bosch, Rembrandt and Rubens to Füger and Waldmüller, as well as works with thematic links to the focus of the Inserts, works by contemporary artists conceived as site-specific interventions relating to the historical works in the temporary exhibition. The second show in the series features an Insert by Montreal-based Austrian artist Klaus Scherübel.
Considering the Collection
Under the title “Considering the Collection,” the Paintings Gallery collection is being presented in a series of temporary hangings that depart from familiar ways of seeing and offer new perspectives. The second exhibition in the series concentrates on the Baroque period across Europe, showing a cross-section of the Lamberg Collection. They include many of the collection’s highlights such as Rembrandt’s Portrait of a Young Woman, Pieter de Hooch’s Family Group in a Courtyard in Delft, Peter Paul Rubens’s Boreas and Oreithya, Anthonis van Dyck’s Self-Portrait, and not least Bartolomé Esteban Murillo’s painting Two Boys Playing Dice that has not been exhibited for a long time.
Other themes in this second exhibition in the “Considering the Collection” series relate to Klaus Scherübel’s insert Cranach’s Holy Productivity. In the front section of the Hansen Gallery, the theme of the development of representations of space in early modern painting is positioned as a transition between the Insert and the exhibition of works from the collection. The group with two versions of Coronation of the Virgin by Dieric Bouts and Antonio da Fabriano, Giovanni di Paolo’s A Miracle of St Nicholas of Tolentino and Francesco Ubertinis Baptism of Christ offers an exemplary overview of the various positions north and south of the Alps, leading from gold ground to empirical perspective views to single-point perspective.
As an additional reference to the Insert, Room 6, that is dominated by Hieronymus Bosch’s Last Judgement Triptych, the most famous work in the collection, features a famous group of works by Lucas Cranach the Elder, offering insights into fundamental aspects of his artistic production including choice of motifs, workshop practice, materiality and clientele.
In the adjacent corridor, Room 7, the theme of the artist’s self-portrait is featured as another reference to the Insert. The selection sheds light on self-portraits by (male) artists of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, most of them working at the Academy, leading in non-chronological order from a Baroque state portrait by Jacob van Schuppen, to the stripped-down self-portrait of Heinrich Friedrich Füger, to Franz Eybl’s expression of a sensitive artist individual.
Designed to refer to Scherübel’s Insert both spatially and in terms of content, Room 8 takes visitors back to the beginning of the exhibition and presents an exemplary selection of paintings marked by the use of architectural fragments such as arch-shaped openings and mighty twisted columns. As well as works by Pierre Subleyras and Peter Paul Rubens, the show also includes Sébastien Bourdon’s rarely shown painting Marriage of the Virgin.
Works by
Hans Baldung Grien, Hendrik van Balen, Herri met de Bles, Hieronymus Bosch, Alessandro di Mariano Filipepi, known as Botticelli, Sébastien Bourdon, Dieric Bouts, Adriaen Brouwer, Joos van Cleve, Lucas Cranach the Elder, Anthonis van Dyck, Antonio da Fabriano, Barent Fabritius, Francesco Raibolini, known as Francia, Heinrich Friedrich Füger, Jan Fyt, Luca Giordano, Ambrosius Holbein, Jacob Jordaens, Bernardo Keilhau, known as Monsù Bernardo, Johann Baptist von Lampi the Younger, Nicolaes Maes, Nicola Malinconico, Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, Rembrandt van Rijn, Peter Paul Rubens, Jacob van Ruisdael, Isaack van Ruisdael, Pierre Subleyras, Domenico Maria Viani, Cornelis de Vos, Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller, Jan Wildens, et al.
Curated by
Claudia Koch
Cranach’s Holy Productivity VOL. 28 An Insert by Klaus Scherübel
Against the backdrop of his installations that engage with the museographical genre of the period room, and related conceptual works in which aspects of painting, books, sculpture, architecture and exhibition design enter into relation with one another, Klaus Scherübel’s current project deals with ways of depicting space and architecture in connection with questions of self-portraiture and strategies of productivity, as exemplified by a work by Lucas Cranach the Elder, one of the most important painters of the German Renaissance and Reformation.
The work in question is 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. This raises the question of whether and how this setting can be linked to the specific context within which the painting was made, and to the commercial aspect of Cranach’s art production.
In Room 2, a spectacular large-scale installation has been realized as a kind of stage: Cranach’s Holy Productivity VOL. 28. In this work, the schematic, set-like architectural components that structure the painting’s pictorial space are explored as a three-dimensional spatialized picture without the original work’s cast of characters. Other new works, on show in Room 1, include a digital slide show that alludes to the radiographic processes used in museological analysis of the materials in paintings, while also parodying the sitcom genre. Another body of work deals with the collection of religious relics assembled by Frederick the Wise, as depicted in the Heiltumsbuch (1509) which was illustrated by Cranach and which Scherübel reinterprets in a media shift as a reprint. Finally, there are new works in the series Untitled (The Artist at Work) that show the researching artist on Cranach’s trail in Wittenberg.
The Insert is also situated within the context of the lengthy process of restoring and studying Cranach’s panel paintings St Valentine and a Kneeling Donator (c. 1502/1503) and The Holy Kinship (1510–1512) from the Paintings Gallery collection. The digital presentation in Room 4 offers early insights into this process.
Curated by
Sabine Folie
at A…kademie der bildenden Künste Wien, Vienna
until February 16, 2025