Works that explore ‘Beauty and Transience’

A group show curated by Andreas Hoffer at Vienna’s Essl Museum has artist stances commenting on existential issues. The main hall turns into a reflection zone presenting works by Jörg Immendorff, Jannis Kounellis, Zoran Mušič, Marc Quinn, Daniel Spoerri and Antoni Tàpies, accompanied by an art reader with literary contributions by 17 young writers.

The exhibition presents works that, at first glance, run counter to traditional ideas of beauty. Explaining the concept, an accompanying essay states, “For centuries, artists have been exploring the notion of beauty, which in western civilization took its origin in Classical Antiquity and was only challenged in the 20th century through the study of non-European civilizations.

The show is not designed to postulate views, but to facilitate, through art, a discussion on central human issues and to inspire viewers to challenge their own ideas and contemplate the subjects presented.” The idea for it was inspired by an installation by Jannis Kounellis, which the artist designed in 1999 for the inauguration of the museum and which, as so often with his work, is invested with associations to the site and, in this case, the nearby River Danube.

The work of artist Daniel Spoerri also highlights everyday materials and objects. In his trap paintings, Spoerri takes the opposite approach to a painted still life by entrapping the most transient thing, the present moment, and perpetuating it in “eternal life”.

Since his student days, the late German artist Jörg Immendorff, who died in 2007, sought to connect art and life, albeit in a different way from Spoerri, viz. in a radically political sense – one of the key issues Immendorff explored was the social relevance of art. Each of the elements of Antonio Tàpies’ five-piece work, Dietari I-V from 2002 stands for itself, like the unbound pages of a diary which reports of the same repetitions of everyday actions day by day.