3 questions to Verena Gamper, Leopold Museum’s Curator
Marlène Corbun (Head Curator for laCollection) : What do you like about curating?
Verena Gamper : Curating is care-taking, it is developing questions concerning artworks, artists, collections, or currents that make them accessible in their historic dimensions but that also reflect the contemporary perspective they are analysed from. The exhibitions based on these questions should be understood as epistemic spaces that produce knowledge through visibility, through temporary neighborhoods. Conceiving these spaces, stories and narrations is most challenging and makes curating a highly creative process.
MC : What do you find fascinating about the Collection at the Leopold Museum?
VG : The Leopold Museum’s collection has at its core the work of Austrian artist Egon Schiele. But the collection’s founder Rudolf Leopold was aware of the necessity of context to understand the relevance of any work of art, so he embedded Schiele’s work in an impressive collection of paintings, drawings, and sculptures by other artists that worked in Vienna at the turn of the century, among them Gustav Klimt, Richard Gerstl, Oskar Kokoschka, or Koloman Moser. Trying to mirror the then aspired Gesamtkunstwerk, the collection includes also design and handicraft treasures of furniture, ceramics, jewellery, glass, books, and ephemera. This comprehensive approach to artistic production lead to a unique and diverse collection, that is a fertile ground to work on.
MC : Why Egon Schiele’s practice is still very much relevant today?
VG : The human body and psyche received artistic and scientific attention of unprecedented intensity in the era around 1900, notably so in Vienna. Schiele was transcending Jugendstil‘s decoratively sealed representations of the body in favor of an offensive, blunt and honest disclosure of a subject in crisis. In his countless, sometimes gender fluid self-portraits he scrutinized corporeality and identity, showing the self to be established in a constant process of performing and staging, in a life dominated by Eros and Thanatos. Furthermore, in his self-portraits but also in his depictions of others questions about gaze regimes and objectification are raised. It is the pitiless and blatant reflection on the quintessence of being human, that make Schiele’s work so vital and relevant today.
About the Leopold Museum, Vienna
One of the world’s most important collections of Austrian art
The Leopold Museum, with some 6,000 artworks, houses one of the world’s most important collections of Austrian art, focusing on the second half of the nineteenth century and subsequent Modernism. The intersection of art with the intellectual world of “Vienna around 1900” is uniquely accessible at the Leopold Museum, where art historical developments from the Biedermeier period to Atmospheric Impressionism to Expressionism to New Objectivity can be followed in great depth.
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