Aneta Grzeszykowska's photograph shows a woman with dark hair and a black scarf, which also partially covers her head. She has blue eyes and is looking upwards to the left. She is wearing gray and in the background you can see a simple skyscraper.

20 Years
of the
VERBUND COLLECTION

The ALBERTINA presents the anniversary exhibition of the VERBUND COLLECTION on the occasion of its 20th anniversary.

The company collection was established in 2004 by VERBUND, Austria’s leading power company, and comprises around 1,000 works by 200 artists. The 15 issued publications of the collection had a big impact on promoting the careers of a number of female artists. This exhibition shows numerous new acquisitions, which are on display for the first time in Austria.

Title image: Aneta Grzeszykowska: Untitled Film Stills, 2006
© 2023 Aneta Grzeszykowska / Courtesy of the artist and Raster Gallery, Warsaw / VERBUND COLLECTION, Vienna
Acquired 2008

1,000 works by 200 artists

Artists

Exhibition

The exhibition was on display at the Albertina from 29 February to 5 May 2024.

A comprehensive brochure was published to accompany the exhibition. It is available free of charge for all visitors to the exhibition on site and HEREPDF / 2.9 MB for download.

Albertina

besucher@albertina.at

+43 1 534 83 540

20 Years of the VERBUND COLLECTION in the ALBERTINA

The ALBERTINA Museum presents an exhibition of works from VERBUND COLLECTION, Vienna, held in celebration of the collection’s twentieth anniversary. The corporate collection was founded by the leading Austrian electricity company VERBUND in 2004 and holds around one thousand works by two hundred artists. The catalogues released by its publishing arm have given a significant boost to some of the artists’ careers. The show includes new acquisitions that will be presented in Austria for the first time.

Collection focus: Feminist avant-garde

The shows opens with those female artists whose works were monographically collected in line with the maxim “Depth not breadth”, such as Cindy Sherman, Francesca Woodman, Birgit Jürgenssen and Renate Bertlmann. Cindy Sherman is accompanied by contemporaries such as Martha Wilson and younger positions such as Aneta Grzeszykowska, who recreated Sherman’s famous Untitled Film Stills in colour.

There follow works from the Feminist Avant-Garde of the 1970s. For the first time in the history of art, these pioneering women succeeded in creating a completely new “image of the woman”. The female body escaped from a centuries-old object status and appeared as the subject, as the actor.

The term “feminist avant-garde” was coined by founding director Gabriele Schor in 2007 in order to honour the pioneering work of these female artists and successfully positioned them in the canon of art history with a ten-year European exhibition tour. Through this in-depth focus, Schor managed to built up a unique selling point for the VERBUND COLLECTION.

The work by Birgit Jürgnessen entitled FRAU from 1972 shows a woman tracing the letters of the word Frau. The word becomes recognizable with red auxiliary lines.

Insights into the exhibition 20 Years of the VERBUND COLLECTION

The artist Zanele Muholi shows pride and dignity with her self-portraits. She lies naked on white lacquer. She looks at a mirror. She makes direct contact with the viewer through her reflection. The photograph is in black and white.

The collage “Spagaten” by Frida Orupabo shows a deconstructed woman doing the splits.

The black-and-white photograph by Gordon Matta-Clark shows a simple detached house that has been cut in half.

This self-portrait by Cindy Sherman from 1978 shows the artist in black and white. Only her upper body is visible. She is wearing eye-catching eyeliner, a wig with a headscarf and a blouse. In the background are stately-looking houses. She looks over the camera.

The untitled work by Aneta Grzeszykowska from 2006 shows a woman kneeling in a kitchen in front of a stove. A paper bag lies in front of her. It is torn open and the shopping is visible. She is looking at the viewer from below.

Birgit Jürgenssen's work shows the lower body of a woman. Her vulva is covered by a large leaf. The picture is held in golden bronze tones.

Further artistic positions

Against the background of the spatialisation of art in the 1970s, another area is devoted to those works that deal with the conceptual, poetic and psychological perception of spaces and places. Gordon Matta-Clark saws a house in two, tilts one half a few degrees and thus creates his “anarchitecture” as a criticism of conventional architecture. David Wojnarowicz poetically links his life in New York with that of the French poet Arthur Rimbaud. And Ernesto Neto, based on Sigmund Freud’s interpretation of dreams, creates a psychologically charged space, in which a doll sits in a rocking chair and is secretly connected with a super-ego outside the cage.

The anniversary exhibition presents new acquisitions in the context of “Gender, Identity & Diversity”, works that have never been seen in Austria before. Artists create spaces of memory, such as South African-born Kganye Lebohang, who looks at her relationship with her deceased mother through photo montages, or Alexander Ugay, who was born in Kazakhstan. Starting from the Korean diaspora, he searches for traces of his ancestors using analogue and AI photographs. With her large collages, the Norwegian-Nigerian artist Frida Orupabo creates scenes covering topics such as colonial history, slavery, racism and sexism. Zanele Muholi identifies as non-binary and advocates actively for LGBTQIA+ rights in South Africa. Muholi’s staged self-portraits criticise the Eurocentric view of the Black body. Sin Wai Kin deconstructs and reconstructs social narratives and embodies four non-binary identities of a fictitious boygroup with the video “It’s Always You”.