Political, economic, and social turmoil shaped Germany's short-lived Weimar Republic (1919–1933). These pivotal years also became a most creative period of 20th-century German culture, generating innovation in literature, music, film, theater, and architecture.

In painting, a trend of matter-of-fact realism took hold in Germany like nowhere else in Europe. Disillusioned by the cataclysm of World War I, the most vital German artists moved towards a Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity), in particular its branch known as Verism. Christian Schad (1894 – 1982) is considered the main German representative of the New Objectivity Movement. He, like other artists, looked soberly, cynically, and even ferociously at their fellow citizens and found their true métier in portraiture.

The Leopold Museum shows the first comprehensive exhibition of Schad's works as well as numerous international loans for comparison.

Hopper’s pictures “deal with America not only on the surface, but dig deep into the American dream, radically examining this profoundly American dilemma of appearances and reality,” says the German film maker Wim Wenders, who refers to the great American painter Edward Hopper (1882–1967) in his work like many other artists from Alfred Hitchcock and David Hockney to Paul Auster and Peter Handke. Hardly any twentieth-century artist has succeeded in combining existential artistic claims with an aesthetics that describes everyday life, the individual moment, and the iconography of a place in such a poetical and impressive manner. Regardless of the art fashions of his day, Hopper developed a metarealism transforming the subjective perception of reality into something universal, reflecting the isolation of modern urban man, and exploring new forms of visual narration. The representation and manipulation of space, time, light, and shadow are the essential ingredients guaranteeing Hopper’s unbroken topicality in art. His reduced, psychologically charged, and meticulously constructed spaces unfold a lasting tension between the real and the fictitious, specific moments and duration, intimacy and anonymity, nature and civilization.

Edward Hopper: Western Motel, 1957
Yale University Art Gallery
Bequest of Stephen Carlton Clark, B.A, 1903

From Ed Ruscha’s stereotype condensations of the American myth and Rachel Whiteread’s and David Claerbout’s investigations of space-time coordinates to the homelessness of present-day existence as mirrored in Philip-Lorca diCorcia’s and Tim Eitel’s work, Hopper’s oeuvre finds its echo in the exhibition’s contemporary positions. Hopper’s works continue to describe the state of today’s world, his cinematographic view providing the starting point for narrative inventions and imaginations in space and time.

Participating artists: Edward Hopper and David Claerbout, Dawn Clements, Jonas Dahlberg, Thomas Demand, Gustav Deutsch, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Tim Eitel, Jim Jarmusch, Rachel Khedoori, Mark Lewis, Ed Ruscha, Markus Schinwald/Oleg Soulimenko, Jeff Wall, Rachel Whiteread

The show presents over 30 paintings, photographs and sculptures by the young Swedish artist, born 1975 in Björsäter, who received the 2007 “Bâloise Art Prize” at Art Basel.


Andreas Eriksson, Untitled (Treetrunks), 2007
C-Print, Courtesy Galleri Riis, Oslo
© VBK Vienna , 2008
Photo courtesy of MUMOK

Since 2001 Eriksson, who is primarily a painter, has extended the spectrum of his artistic mediums. Now, he captures the impressions of his daily walks—walking the dog—in photographs. However, in the medium of paint he develops what are usually quiet and largely abstract pictures. Photographs and paintings are often combined into multi-part works in which the images that have been created by differing means enter into a dialogue with each other.

19h30

Darkness descends over Vienna with black metal bands in concert.
The Darkest Tour: Filth Fest
Cradle of Filfth