VIENNA.- The Leopold Museum’s exhibition “Carl Spitzweg – Erwin Wurm. Hilarious! Hilarious?” (25th March to 19th June 2017) is the first presentation of Carl Spitzweg’s profoundly timeless and strikingly current oeuvre in Austria. In the exhibition curated by the Leopold Museum’s Director Hans-Peter Wipplinger, the ironic-humorist German painter commonly associated with the Biedermeier period Carl Spitzweg (1808–1885) encounters the master of an extended concept of sculpture Erwin Wurm (born in 1954).
The exhibition at the Leopold Museum is the first presentation of Carl Spitzweg’s oeuvre in Austria. Featuring approximately 100 paintings and graphic works as well as book illustrations, it is also the first presentation that focuses explicitly on those aspects of the artist’s oeuvre which – contrary to the ideas of tranquility and petit bourgeois idylls usually conjured up by the Biedermeier period – are critical of his time and the society he lived in and document the schisms and conflicts of the time. However, this exploration of Spitzweg’s oeuvre also reveals the topicality of his themes which are reflected in the 21st century’s “Generation Biedermeier” and are highlighted by means of 15 precisely placed interventions by Erwin Wurm who deploys “humor as a weapon”.
Hans-Peter Wipplinger: “While Carl Spitzweg’s oeuvre is embedded in the specific cultural-historical atmosphere of the Biedermeier period, the conventional definition falls significantly short in the case of Spitzweg, for it prevents a more complex and progressive interpretation of Spitzweg’s works and thinking, which – as the approximately 100 exhibits illustrate – must also include an analysis of social hierarchizations and power relations, an examination of gender relations as well as the subtle questioning of harmony in an ostensibly ideal world.”
The epoch-spanning and dialogue-based exhibition concept is divided into individual thematic chapters. In the first exhibition room, Carl Spitzweg’s small-town renderings, which are carried by precise and detailed depictions, enter into a dialogue with Erwin Wurm’s 2010 work Narrow House. Only at first glance do Spitzweg’s works resemble idyllic cityscapes populated by people dressed in folkloristic attire, including guards, musicians, singers and female protagonists.A closer inspection reveals feudal, hierarchic, patriarchal and authoritarian structures referring to a system of bigoted restraints characterized by the definitions of morals in Spitzweg’s times. This impression of petty constraints is also conveyed by Wurm’s work Narrow House which, invoking the artist’s parental home with changed volumes and proportions, is a reflection on the social narrowness of past decades.
Many of Carl Spitzweg’s works reveal his subversive attitude towards the powers of the state, be they customs officials, guards or citizen soldiers. The unemployment of uniformed officers during peaceful times following the Napoleonic Wars encouraged Spitzweg to create grotesque depictions, for instance of knitting guards. Spitzweg was also unafraid to address the corruption and injustices of the police state. The topicality of these themes is illustrated by Erwin Wurm’s 2010 work New York Police Cap Gold showing an oversized police cap and inviting beholders to stand underneath this symbol of a constitutional state, which appears both protecting and threatening.
Further sections of the presentation are devoted to Carl Spitzweg’s passion for depicting contradictory characters which reveal the artist not only as a chronicler of his time but especially as a sensitive psychologist. These include apparently pious monks who have retreated from civilization to lead ostensibly ascetic lives in their hermitages, where they in actual fact pursue a rather hedonistic lifestyle. Renderings of scholars, at times heightened into almost whimsical depictions, were used by Spitzweg to ironize the belief in science of his times. Further characters encountered in his oeuvre are philistines such as “Sunday Hunters” enjoying their leisure time activities and “Schoolmasters” straying from the straight and narrow not only in the literal but also in a moral sense.
“Amidst threatened idylls we encounter manifold broken characters in Spitzweg’s scenes. The artist greatly sympathized with these loners and odd characters (…) who always appear shrouded in a cloak of resignation and resistance when going about their at times bizarre everyday business. The fact that Spitzweg’s protagonists were often classical anti-ideal types generally not deemed compatible with the established system is all the more remarkable as he created them in a climate of political restoration and conformist behavior following the Congress of Vienna in 1815”, writes Hans-Peter Wipplinger in the catalogue accompanying the exhibition.
Spitzweg’s anti-heroes find their equivalent in Erwin Wurm’s One Minute Sculptures and other works which, like Spitzweg’s paintings, often combine situational humor with a socio-critical message. The common denominator of both artists’ oeuvres is – as the exhibition illustrates – a critically-reflected humor which is deployed as a weapon and shows everyday life from a different perspective, thus evoking complex dimensions.
The opening of the exhibition in the presence of Erwin Wurm and his wife Elise Mougin was attended by, among other guests, the German ambassador in Vienna Johannes K. Haindl, who delivered one of the opening speeches and was accompanied by his wife Regina Haindl, the members of the Board of Directors of the Leopold Museum Elisabeth Leopold, Agnes Husslein-Arco, Helmut Moser and Carl Aigner, as well as the museum’s Managing Director Gabriele Langer.
Further in attendance were the exhibition’s cooperation partner and main lender Fritz Ritzmann, the president of the foundation of the Museum Georg Schäfer Schweinfurt, the collectors Rudolf and Edith Breuninger, Rudolf and Elisabeth Geymüller as well as Sonja Leimann and Hella Pohl (Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac).
