Birgit Jürgenssen
in ‘The Shape of Time’, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
6 March – 8 July 2018
Installation view, ‘The Shape of Time’, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, 2018. Courtesy: © Estate Birgit Jürgenssen, Vienna
Installation view, ‘The Shape of Time’, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, 2018
Installation view, ‘The Shape of Time’, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, 2018
The Shape of Time is an exhibition of remarkable artworks dating from 1800 to the present day. Borrowed from some of the most important museums and private collections across the world, they have been placed within the rooms of our Picture Gallery in dialogue with our own historical objects and artists, as stepping stones to lead us from the point at which our own collections end to the point at which we stand today. Visitors are invited to look simultaneously backwards and forwards between objects made many centuries years apart, either of which has the potential to alter our experience of the other.
In the spirit of George Kubler’s groundbreaking 1962 book of the same name (The Shape of Time), the pairings seek to reveal the flow of time and space and the evolution of ideas and images across centuries and cultures, and to suggest a view of art history as a reservoir of ideas drawn from repeatedly over time.