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Isaac Julien, Love, 2003, Sammlung Ursula Blickle Stiftung © der Künstler.

Tim Noble / Sue Webster, Toxic Shock, 1997 © die Künstler, Collection of John and Amy Phelan.

Marina Abramovic, Rest Energy, Video, Courtesy Netherlands Media Arts Institute, Montevideo/Time Based Arts, Amsterdam © die Künstlerin/the artist, VBK, Wien, 2007.

Franz von Stuck, Amor Imperator, ca. 1887/88, Gemälde, Museum Villa Stuck (Schenkung Ziersch), München, Photograph Angela Bröhan.

Kunsthalle Vienna
Museumplatz1
43-15-85-21-89-33
Vienna
Halle 1
True Romance
Allegories of Love
from the Renaissance
to the Present
October 5, 2007-
February 3, 2008

And blessed be the first sweet      agony
I felt when I found myself bound      to Love,
The bow and all the arrows that      have pierced me,
The wounds that reach the      bottom of my heart.

— Francesco Petrarca

When we speak of love, an abundance of images are activated in our minds — ideal images and counter images. We think about burning passion and feelings that have grown cold, about a heart set in flames or one that has frozen solid. About walking on clouds or tumbling into the depths of despair. These metaphors of love, ready to be called up at a moment’s notice, are not recent inventions of the advertising and film industries. Their roots reach far back to the origins of modern Western culture.

The exhibition True Romance writes a history of the depiction of love in the fine arts that extends across various epochs and media. The show offers a spectacular examination of the visual and rapid development of the great emotion beginning with the Renaissance’s reception of classical antiquity, to images of love between baroque and modern, the mise love in the current art scene.

The exhibition’s starting point are the sonnets written by poet Francesco Petrarca (1304 which set off an avalanche of love poems in Europe between the 15th and 16th centuries. In his Canzoniere, the poet was the first to elevate love to the rank of artistic inspiration and elocution. Ever since, love’s culturally inspiring power of emotion has been expressed in ever new ways in art, whether in the form of Pieter de Hooch’s portrayals of morally regimented lives, Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s idealized Pre-Raphaelite works, or Barnaby Furnas's expressive surreal phantasmagorias, and other current differentiations of loving and intimacy.

For the first time at the Kunsthalle Wien, historical works will be shown along with contemporary artwork, in order to draw parallels between the topoi. This allows focus to shift to the central mythological figures of love, Amor and Venus, as current allegories of love in an iconographic series of pictures ranging from Franz von Stuck’s Amor Imperator through Dora Maar’s cryptic arrow carrier, to Luis Camnitzer’s bizarre iron sculptures. Venus is thematized as the embodiment of celestial and profane love in Adriaen van der Werff’s painting Venus und Amor, in Carl Andre’s minimalist floor piece Venus Ellipse, Erwin Blumenfeld’s Venus Nu, and in the depictions of the mythological lovers Venus und Adonis by Joseph Heintz d.Ä. and Cy Twombly. Mark Boyle/Joan Hills, VALIE EXPORT, Michelangelo Pistoletto, and Peter Weibel also produce their own contemporary revisions of the Venus myth.

Reflections on love in contemporary art often deal with unfulfilled desire and the mass media’s distribution and commercialization of love, as can be viewed, for example, in works by Katharina Fritsch, Richard Prince, and Jean Jacques Lebel. The loss of the ideal takes center stage here, yet nonetheless, praises of love continue to be sung in old and new forms. Either in images taken directly from everyday life, for example, by Cecilia Edefalk and Hans Feldmann, in the intimate sphere of the photography of Nan Goldin, or in Felix Gonzalez's Untitled (Loverboys), where the bodies of the lovers are weighed out in candies. Christian Jankowski’s treatment of virtual love cravings, Let’s get physical/digital, builds a contemporary bridge to Petrarca; although it is far away from the unfulfilled ideal of love alluded to in the poet’s sonnets. Remaining is love’s everlasting nature, which triumphs over the entire sensual world. As a source of personal happiness, love inscribes itself permanently into life, and at the same time, openly, concealed, and idealized into art.

The exhibition presents approximately 130 works by 80 artists in various media, from painting, drawing, and prints to photography, film, and installations.

Artists in the exhibition include: Marina Abramovic/Ulay, Carl André, David Armstrong, Richard Artschwager, Erwin Blumenfeld, Katia Bourdarel, Mark Boyle/Joan Hills, KP Brehmer, Birgit Brenner, Cecily Brown, Klaus vom Bruch, Sophie Calle/Gregory Shephard, Luis Camnitzer, Heinrich Campendonk, Chris Cunningham, Carola Dertnig, Jim Dine, Albrecht Dürer, Cecilia Edefalk, Nicole Eisenman, Tracey Emin, VALIE EXPORT, Hans Furnas, Giorgione, Nan Goldin, Félix Gonzáles John Hilliard, Carsten Höller, Pieter de Hooch, Takahiko Iimura, Robert Indiana, Runa Islam, Christian Jankowski, Anna Jermolaewa, Allen Jones, Isaac Julien, Janice Kerbel, Martin Kippenberger, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Gustav Klimt, Max Klinger, Käthe Kollwitz, Jean Ryan McGinness, Tracey Moffatt, Mariko Mori, Mark Morrisroe, Kolo Moser, Mariella Mosler, Edvard Munch, Tim Noble/Sue Webster, Chris Ofili, Anna Oppermann, Parmigianino, Max Pechstein, Raymond Pettibon, Elizabeth Peyton, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Sigmar Polke, Elodie Pong, Richard Prince, Franz Radziwill, Mel Ramos, Lois Renner, Ulrike Rosenbach, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Michael Sailstorfer, Susanne Sander, Johann Nepomuk Schaller, Markus Schinwald, Christoph Schmidberger, Franz von Stuck, Ena Swansea, Johann Heinrich Tischbein d. Ä., Cy Twombly, Petrus Wandrey, Peter Weibel, Adriaen van der Werff and others.

Curators of the exhibition are Belinda Grace Gardner (Konzept), Angela Stief/Gerald Matt (Kunsthalle Wien) Scientific committee: Michael Buhrs (Museum Villa Stuck, Munich), Dirk Luckow (Kunsthalle zu Kiel), Gerald Matt (Kunsthalle Wien)

True Romance is a project of the Kunsthalle zu Kiel in cooperation with the Kunsthalle Wien and the Museum Villa Stuck, Munich.

Exhibition catalogue: True Romance. Allegorien der Liebe von der Renaissance bis heute / Allegories of Love from the Renaissance to the Present, Ed.: Belinda Grace Gardner (Hamburg), Michael Buhrs (Museum Villa Stuck, Munich), Dirk Luckow (Kunsthalle zu Kiel), Gerald Matt (Kunsthalle Wien). Introduction: Michael Buhrs, Dirk Luckow, Gerald Matt. Texts by Belinda Grace Gardner, Michael Glasmeier, Eva Illouz, Hanne Loreck, Angela Stief, Ingeborg Walter and Dörte Zbikowski. German/English, 268 pp. with app. 120 illust. Dumont. ISBN 978.