Klosterneuburg is a unique location. In this small town north of Vienna are Dr. Hoffmann’s former sanatorium where Franz Kafka went to die and the Gugging Museum, one of David Bowie’s favorites, which flourished in the pavilion of a psychiatric hospital and exhibits the best representatives of Art Brut. Here is the Dump Austria, the monastery that Emperor Charles VI of Habsburg built in the 18th century imitating the Madrid model but which in the end was left half done, with just a monumental façade that dazzles as you approach the city, and here some of the best ones stand out. river beaches for swimming on the Danube. From Vienna you can easily reach it by bicycle (or public transport) in just over half an hour following the course of the river. And now there is also the Albertina.
The objective of the opening is to facilitate access to its collection of contemporary art after 1945, which exceeds 65,000 pieces. “The Albertina Klosterneuburg is a vision come true. The decentralized location on the outskirts of a large city represents a key stimulus for the region,” says the director of the Albertina, Klaus Albrecht Schröder, who is leaving this year after 25 years as head of the company. In 2020 he inaugurated the Albertina Modern to focus on contemporary art in a privileged space, the Künstlerhaus, after a renovation of almost 60 million euros, and now he takes over the building that between 1999 and 2016 housed the vibrant Essl Museum.
The uniqueness of Klosterneuburg is the main challenge for the Albertina as an art museum of international standing. Its latest sequel is not located in the heart of Vienna at the doors of the Opera like the original museum, nor in the middle of Ringstrasse next to the Musikverein – home of the New Year’s Concert of the Vienna Philharmonic – like the Albertina Modern, a satellite center ten minutes walk from the mother house. To visit it you have to move.
The Essl Museum opened its doors in 1999 to exhibit one of the best collections of contemporary art in the world, assembled by the magnate Karlheinz Essl, and closed in 2016, drowned by financial problems. Since then it has served as a repository for the Albertina, which received the Essl collection as a donation. For a time, on the horizon of Klosterneuburg, the Kaiser’s trompe-l’oeil abbey and Heinz Tesar’s demolished warehouse museum seemed to be in dialogue. The architect designed a bright building with geometric, white and minimalist lines, reminiscent of a ship stranded on the banks of the Danube.
Schröder and Constanze Malissa have curated three exhibitions with a total of 150 works and 3,000 square meters of exhibition area. On the first floor, the visitor is greeted by Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, protagonists of the exhibition. Pop Art. The good side of life, a Monty Python-style adage to exhibit an artistic current that reveals to us between neons and resplendent colors that everything – comics, newspapers, celebrities, people – is susceptible to becoming a fetish, a product, a pure object of consumption. Soon the canvases of Mel Ramos and Alex Katz and Jannis Varelas and Kiki Kogelnik appear. Also the suited corridor by Robert Klemmer, the work with which the opening of the Albertina Modern was announced to the world.
On the upper floor it is displayed From Hundertwasser to Kiefer: from the symbol of freedom to the shadows of the past. If pop art is concerned with interpreting capitalism, Georg Baselitz, Jörg Immendorff, Markus Lüpertz and Anselm Kiefer focused on the ominous German past in the 1960s. These artists, says curator Constanze Malissa, “used representation not as propaganda, but as a critique of their own history: the war, the division of Germany and the atomization of society.” They are accompanied by Maria Lassnig, the artist who developed the concept of “body consciousness” in works since the 1940s, where the perception of one’s own body provides the starting point for exploring the world.
The historic Albertina, the institution that houses more than a million works of art, most of them on canvas or paper, is committed to sculpture in Klosterneuburg. In the third exhibition, The wounded world, the works of Fritz Wotruba, Marc Quinn and Franz West are on display. It is a cabinet of horrors that portrays everything from the AIDS epidemic to the crimes of the US army in the Iraqi prison of Abu Ghraib, the charred corpses of Auschwitz or the drama of the refugees. It is art’s look at war, illness, misery and death. Although there is also room for young artists like Stefanie Holler capable of evoking the nostalgia of an old typewriter with a stick of charcoal.
This year the Albertina Klosterneuburg will be open from Thursday to Sunday until November 2. Klaus Albrecht Schröder says goodbye to the Albertina and wanted to do it in a big way, with two new headquarters and the focus on contemporary art (in the Viennese salons they refer to the museum with some sarcasm as the “Albrechtina”). It will be up to the new boss from 2025, Ralph Gleis, until now responsible for the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin, to decide what will happen in the future.