UNKNOWN FAMILIARS
The Collections of Vienna Insurance Group

curated by Philippe Batka and Vanessa Joan Müller

On the occasion of the 200th anniversary of Wiener Städtische Versicherungsverein, the main shareholder of the Vienna Insurance Group, Unknown Familiars brings together all six collections of the Group, which encounter each other, their different focuses and histories of development, for the first time. It is in this regard that they are unknown familiars – related, though with never having met before. The collections now complement each other in a precise selection of works, the presentation of which occupies an entire floor of the Leopold Museum, comprising over two hundred works of various genres from different periods. Young, contemporary art meets the modernism of the interwar period; the avant-garde of the 1970s meets contemporary Austrian positions. Starting out from the collection of the Czech Kooperativa – represented with a selection of works from the period from 1900 to 1950 – a network of thematic and stylistic references unfolds, which continues in dialogue and selective overlap with the works from the other collections.

Together with the BTA Baltic collection, the Austrian collections cover a broad spectrum from classical modernism to current contemporary practices. Wiener Städtische Versicherung’s collection includes works from the classical modern period – a era that is also well represented in the Leopold Museum – and also extends through the 20th century to more recent works by artists living in Vienna. The BTA Baltic collection starts directly in the present day. The Serbian Wiener Städtische osiguranje, on the other hand, primarily looks back to the subversive and conceptual Yugoslavian avant-garde in the latter half of the 20th century. With works in a range of media, Unknown Familiars presents its significant representatives, who are still less well known in Western Europe.

Surrealist works, such as those by TOYEN, form the atmospheric junction for a curatorial approach that continues into the present day. Surrealism can be found in numerous objects in the show, regardless of when they were created. It forms the invisible prism of the exhibition, allowing the various collections to appear in unexpected bundles across art-historical periods and media. Sustained by an associatively designed exhibition route and a display by Robert Müller that is conveyed through modernist forms, Unknown Familiars lifts some of the cornerstones of the familiar view of art in favour of an encounter with the new, placing the familiar – the familial – in an unfamiliar perspective.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue in which the curators Philippe Batka and Vanessa Joan Müller take an in-depth look at a total of around one hundred artistic positions.