A HOUSE FOR GUSTAV KLIMT

Gold… how many painters in modern times use(d) gold…?!?

Indeed, it is very easy to become vulgar, using gold, as a painter, today.

But it was not always so… in the Middle Ages, not to speak about “Ancient Art” gold was a frequent occurrence.

But the separation between Craft and Art left modern art weakened, we feel… and weakened not just by the disappearance of gold… weakened by many other things, despite its utmost “freedom” that it finally arrived at.

There are exceptions though, and a very significant one is the great Austrian painter Gustav Klimt.

It is not an accident, no doubt, that his father was a gold engraver… to follow on the father’s steps, even unconsciously, is not very uncommon.

But Klimt brought the golden ornament to enviable heights that didn’t desert the above mentioned “modern freedom.”

Quite the opposite, his art is quite “modern,” yet intelligible, like Jung’s house on lake Zurich, to a pre-modern art and sensibility.

SEX & GOLD

This could be, in reductive forms, a possible title for a contemplation of Klimt’s work.

And maybe we could add: THE LABIRYNTH, that “scandal for reason,” as it has been called.

In his case it was a formal labyrinth, a labyrinth that was again another distancing, somehow, from modernity, as conventionally understood.

On the other hand, his obvious concern with Eros didn’t degrade itself in the prose of so much contemporary art.

Perhaps Gold helped… and so did the labyrinth, since both problematise the obvious and the facile, although Aurum Vulgi could be indeed vulgar…

But not in Gustav Klimt’s work.

Again and again, the incredible disjunctions present in Viennese culture, fractured as it is between a Western longing and an Eastern one, find in Klimt, as in other great Austrian artists, architects, writers an invitation, for us, towards SYNTHESIS.

SYNTHESIS between the Modern and the Pre / Post Modern, between Ornament and Structure (if we are to use the language of the architect), between Psyche and Physiology, or The Body.

The Body is immensely important in Klimt’s work, particularly the female body. In combination with Gold and the formal contortions (see intricacies) of the Labyrinth, the female Body becomes Cosmology.

We ask you to explore this Cosmology, in the mystery of Love and Conjunction  in a project that appropriately can be called:

A HOUSE FOR GUSTAV KLIMT

This year we will celebrate 150 years since Klimt’s birthday and many exhibitions and events are planned in Vienna.

We invite you to join us, for a celebratory exhibition at Hinterland Gallery in Vienna that will open on July 14^th, 2012, exactly 150 years since Gustav Klimt came into this world.

There is an entry fee of 20 Euros payable through the Registration section of our website. This fee will help us organize the exhibition and hopefully publish a small catalogue. The registration deadline is June 15^th, 2012. Please submit your works digitally to works@icarch.us by July 12th, 2012.

As always, we invite you to send us ANY work, ANY size and ANY format that responds to the theme. We will publish all the works received on our website, but only the best works will be displayed in the aforementioned exhibition.

If you have any questions, please contact us.

This event is organized by ICARCH Gallery and the Viennese Art Space Hinterland.

Thank you,

ICARCH Gallery & Hinterland Gallery