Leopold Museum

“Unknown Familiars”: a stroll with a gut feeling

Oskar Kokoschka's "Connection - Alice in Wonderland" is one of the stars of the Vienna Insurance Group collection.(Bild: Foto: Wiener Städtische Versicherung AG – Vienna Insurance )

From May 8, the "Unknown Familiars" exhibition at the Leopold Museum invites visitors to take an intuitive stroll through highlights from the Vienna Insurance Group's diverse collections.

"They are like relatives who have never met," is how curators Philippe Batka and Vanessa Joan Müller explain the concept of the "Unknown Familiars" exhibition. The works are related because they all come from the six collections of the Vienna Insurance Group and are being brought together at the Leopold Museum to mark the 200th anniversary of Wiener Städtische Versicherungsverein. 

An unusual encounter, as the approximately 200       works selected from the  collections in Austria, the Czech Republic,  Serbia and Latvia could not be more different. Contemporary art meets the modernism of the interwar period,  stars such as Klimt and Kokoschka meet the Yugoslavian avant-garde, the familiar meets the less familiar.

You shouldn't even try to find a common thread   , the curators assure during the preliminary tour with the "Krone". The hanging does  not follow a chronology. "Rather, the aim is to create dialogs that can be read intuitively," says Batka. "We invite you to take a walk, where you can let your gut feeling guide you and let the works work their magic." The dynamic exhibition architecture plays an important role in this; thanks to retracted walls, it constantly opens up new perspectives, a "contemporary view of works from the past" - and thus connects the highlights of the collections at eye level. 

The exhibition can be seen at the Leopold Museum from May 8.