Danube m- A Breath of Fresh Art on the Danube
Art town Krems and theWachau region are where high-value art meets a of world culture.
Three girls hold one another by the hand, their faces turned inwards and completely concealed by their long black hair. The secretive sculpture by German artist Simon Schubert is part of the current exhibition at the Kunsthalle Krems. Glance upwards for a moment, and you see yourself being watched by nothing but children’s eyes gazing down on visitors from the portraits all around. The exhibition “Of Angels and Rascals” is devoted – as always, with highly interesting cross-references – to children’s portraits spanning four centuries, and ranging from Francisco Ignacio Ruiz dela Iglesia to Maja Vukoje.
The factory used to be where Austria Tabak made its cigarettes, but since the congenial conversion by Adolf Krischanitz was completed in 1995, what became the Kunsthalle Krems has rapidly established itself as one of the most important new exhibition spaces in Austria today. Illuminating associations spanning centuries are the norm rather than the exception here, and visitors to the exhibition in July – which fuses artists’ group Gelitin with British artist Sarah
Danube – Lucas and Hieronymus Bosch -can look forward to more of the same. Then it’s along the Art Mile for a brief look around Factory, the Kunsthalle’s window on young, contemporary art production, and the Forum Frohner, housed in Stein Minorite monastery, where a work by Frohner dating back to the 1960s is confronted by photos by Brassai and various pieces by graffiti artists – more curious cross-references, so it would seem.
Manfred Deix
And then there’s Manfred Deix, of course: the oeuvre of the great Austrian caricaturist has been a pivotal focus of the Karikatur museum for ten years now, along with various temporary exhibitions and the guips of Gustav Peich l, who, in his second guise as an architect, was also responsible for the flat construction of the building with its wildly enhanced roof. You have to doubt, however, whether occupants of the notorious Stein Prison, which lies just over the road, have quite as much to laugh about as visitors to the Carikatur museum.
