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24/3/2005

Egon Schiele

Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

Egon Schiele Accompanied by Marina Abramovic and Dansgroep Krisztina de Châtel

First Dutch retrospective of work by Egon Schiele at the Van Gogh Museum
Visual art, performances and dance in total project on Viennese Expressionist

From 25 March to 19 June 2005 the Van Gogh Museum will host an exhibition of work by the Viennese Expressionist Egon Schiele (1890-1918). Over 100 works, mainly gouaches, watercolours and drawings, will be presented. This is the first retrospective of Schiele's work in the Netherlands. Besides Schiele's expressionist art, the programme also features performances and dance by Marina Abramovic and Dansgroep Krisztina de Châtel. This is the first time that the museum has combined fine art with live performances.

Schiele was originally influenced by the symbolism and sumptuous ornamentation of Gustav Klimt, but this enfant terrible of Vienna's avant-garde soon set out in a different direction. By the time he died in the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918, aged only 28, Schiele had assembled an impressive, though critically maligned oeuvre.

He reached artistic maturity at a remarkably young age. Schiele was barely twenty when he produced his first epoch-making expressionist works in 1910. His emotional development was equally intense and more than any other artist he focused on the psychological problems and sexual obsessions of young adulthood.

His themes of eroticism, sexuality and death - which still have the power to shock today - caused a scandal in early twentieth-century Vienna. In 1912 his pornographic drawings of children landed him a twenty-four-day prison sentence. This dramatic event continued to pursue him for months after his release.

Schiele produced many penetrating portraits. He was less interested in capturing a person's appearance, than in exposing their inner self. While Klimt contrasted realistically portrayed faces and hands with decorative costumes, Schiele juxtaposed the expressionist features of his subject with the empty blackness of their clothing. Various examples of this are shown in the exhibition.

Today Schiele is best known for his female nudes, yet his male portraits and depictions of his own naked body are also impressive. Few artists have examined themselves with such brutal honesty as Egon Schiele. In an astonishing series of self portraits he took on a range of attitudes: from effeminate to elegant, from dandyish to uncertain, and from beautiful to ugly.

His decision to marry in 1915 was an attempt to return to the bosom of bourgeois society. In his subsequent work Schiele abandoned his characteristic grotesqueness. Although he still concentrated on nudes, portraits, landscapes and allegories, Schiele's increasing realism reduced the sense of anxiety that his erotic subjects had once conveyed. The viewer was no longer drawn into a sexual voyage of discovery, remaining instead a voyeur.

A number of works in the exhibition reveal the influence of Vincent van Gogh. Schiele's Room in Neulengbach, for example, is inspired by Van Gogh's The bedroom (1888), a version of which was shown at the Vienna Kunstschau in 1909 where Schiele was able to study it closely. Schiele found Van Gogh's Sunflowers especially fascinating, as an elongated painting and a colour drawing testify.

Egon Schiele is organised in collaboration with the Albertina in Vienna, which possesses the principal collection of the artist's gouaches, watercolours and drawings, and is compiled by the Van Gogh Museum's exhibition curator Edwin Becker.

Schiele / Abramovic / De Châtel
To accompany the exhibition the Van Gogh Museum has commissioned live performances and dance productions by Marina Abramovic and Dansgroep Krisztina de Châtel to be shown in the exhibition galleries. Their shared fascination for the human form is what connects them with Schiele's work. De Châtel and Abramovic are also involved in the design of the exhibition, supervised by art director Peter de Kimpe.

During the exhibition continual performances by members of the Independent Performance Group (IPG) led by Marina Abramovic will be shown each day. At the same time, Dansgroep Krisztina de Châtel will produce a choreography, to be performed twice each day in the exhibition gallery. Every Friday evening (at 20.15) and every Sunday afternoon (at 16.00) an extra dance performance will be shown called Gradual and Persistent Loss of Control (duration: c. 45 minutes). Tickets include the price of the performances.

Publication
The exhibition is accompanied by a publication entitled Egon Schiele: Love and Death, written by Schiele specialist Jane Kallir, Van Gogh Museum / Hatje Cantz, 160 pages, 100 colour and 40 b/w illustrations, hardback, € 29.50. The book is available in Dutch (ISBN 90 400 9065 3), English (ISBN 3 7757 1528 2), French (ISBN 2 07 011807 X) and German (ISBN 3 7757 1527 4). The museum edition (Dutch and English, exclusively at the museum shop or via http://www.vangoghmuseumshop.com ) includes a chapter on the Marina Abramovic and Dansgroep Krisztina de Châtel co-production. Price: € 24.50.

For more information and visual material please contact the Van Gogh Museum Press Office: +31 (0)20 570 52 92

For more information about Dansgroep Krisztina de Châtel and Marina Abramovic contact: Nanja Ruiter, +31 (0)20 6695755

Van Gogh Museum
Paulus Potterstraat, 7 1070 AJ Amsterdam
Opening times
Museum: daily 10-18.00, Friday 10.00-22.00
Ticket office: daily 10-17.30, Friday to 21.30
Shop: daily 10-17.45, friday to 21.45
Restaurant: daily 10-17.30, Friday to 21.30, kitchen to 21.15
Library Museumplein 4: Mon to Fri 10-12.30 and 13.30-17.00
Closed 1 January

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