Leopold Museum presents the Vienna Insurance Group art collections An encounter of six collections: selected art highlights from Austria, the Czech Republic, Serbia and Latvia

08.05.2024

To mark the 200-year anniversary of Wiener Städtische Versicherungsverein, the main shareholder of the Vienna Insurance Group, the Leopold Museum, as a long-standing partner, presents a comprehensive exhibition from 8th May that brings together highlights from all six of the Group’s collections for the first time. Unknown Familiars. The Vienna Insurance Group Collections presents carefully selected works from the companies’ holdings in Austria, the Czech Republic, Serbia and Latvia. The medially diverse presentation occupies an entire museum floor and brings together more than 200 works of various genres from different eras. Young, contemporary art encounters the modernism of the interwar period; the avant-garde of the 1970s meets important positions in current Austrian art.

“Our exhibition brings the unknown – or to be more precise, unknown familiars, as yet unacquainted relatives – to the table. The works presented in the Leopold Museum come from the collections of companies that are connected to the Vienna Insurance Group, but which meet here for the first time. To this end, we are deliberately removing some of the cornerstones of the familiar view of art in favour of an encounter with the new. As an invisible prism, surrealism allows the very diverse collections to emerge in unexpected bundles across art-historical periods and media.”
Philippe Batka, Curator of the exhibition and the Vienna Insurance Group Art Collections

Art from the Vienna Insurance Group Collections in the Leopold Museum

In 2007, the Leopold Museum hosted the exhibition Grund, Mucha, Čapek… Czech Painting from the Kooperativa Collection, which featured works from the Czech collection of the Vienna Insurance Group. In 2010, the museum presented Ringturm.Kunst. Vienna Insurance Group Collection, showing parts of the collections of Wiener Städtische, Wiener Städtische Versicherungsverein and DONAU Versicherung. In the anniversary year of 2024, Unknown Familiars also presents parts of the Serbian Wiener Städtische osiguranje and the Latvian BTA Baltic collections.

“We have found a focus in our selection from the individual collections, but in the presentation of the works, the individual pieces come into dialogues across the collections. There is also no chronological sequence within the exhibition programme. Rather, we have worked out references between the individual works that aim to visualise correspondences in an intuitive way. The direct encounter with art is very important to us.”
Vanessa Joan Müller, Co-curator of the exhibition

Encounters from Six Collections

“As a rendezvous of artworks from the various collections, Unknown Familiars is an exciting encounter that harbours many surprises and allows unknowns to communicate with each other across temporal and spatial boundaries. The presentation thrives on its juxtapositions, analogies and contrasts: Well-known icons of art history from classical modernism from Gustav Klimt to Oskar Kokoschka meet less familiar positions from Daniela Kostova to Elena Narbutaitė. This creates an inspiring encounter and dialogue between the collections and epochs, which – despite different historical, social and temporal contexts – tells of similarities, but also of different cultural and formal-aesthetic worlds.”
Hans-Peter Wipplinger, Director of the Leopold Museum

“We support artists and give those interested access to art and culture, because we know: art is food for the soul. To mark the 200-year anniversary of Wiener Städtische Versicherungsverein, we are showing selected works from all the collections represented in our insurance group from Austria, the Czech Republic, Serbia and Latvia for the first time at the Leopold Museum. We have been cooperating with the most visited museum in Vienna’s MuseumsQuartier for almost two decades, and Wiener Städtische has been insuring the works of art in the Leopold Museum for many years. We wish for all visitors to take much pleasure in the enjoyment of art.”
Robert Lasshofer, Chairman of the Managing Board of Wiener Städtische Versicherungsverein

The Familiar from an Unusual Perspective

Unknown Familiars is characterised by a diversity of media and shows important representatives of a subversive and conceptually inspired avant-garde, still relatively less known in Western Europe. The presentation occupies the entire floor surrounding the Lower Atrium and is organised circularly within the framework of Robert Müller’s exhibition architecture – it can be explored from the central atrium via each of the four halls. Supported by an unusual display and an associatively conceived route, the Unknown Familiars exhibition and its accompanying publication casts an oblique light that places the familiar – and the familiar – in an unfamiliar perspective. The exhibition is on view until 6th October 2024.

Publication of the Exhibition

The texts in the accompanying exhibition catalogue, written by Philippe Batka and Vanessa Joan Müller, attend to the works in the exhibition with explanations and classifications, working out overarching relationships to make comprehensible the curatorial decisions that shaped the exhibition.

Curators: Philippe Batka, Vanessa Joan Müller

Link to the webpage:
leopoldmuseum.org/de/ausstellungen/digitale-ausstellungen/unknownfamiliars/en

Link to detailed press releases and high-resolution press photos:
leopoldmuseum.org/en/press/press-materials/1354/UNKNOWN-FAMILIARS

More than 500 visitors accepted the invitation to the opening ceremony by Leopold Museum Director Hans-Peter Wipplinger and Robert Lasshofer, Chairman of the Managing Board of Wiener Städtische Versicherungsverein, in the presence of Leopold Museum Board members Josef Ostermayer, Sonja Hammerschmid, Saskia Leopold and Danielle Spera as well as Moritz Stipsicz, Managing Director of the Leopold Museum. Among them were the curators of the exhibition Philippe Batka and Vanessa Joan Müller, the CEOs and managing directors of the Vienna Insurance Group Hartwig Löger, Günter Geyer, Helene Kanta, Svetlana Smiljanić, Herbert Allram, Philippe Bardas, Christine Dornaus, Edeltraud Fichtenbauer, Barbara Grötschnig, Oskar Hartmanis, Judith Havasi, Liane Hirner, Peter Höfinger, Karin Kafesie, Gerhard Lahner, Martin Laur, Evija Matveja, Vladimir Mráz, Ralph Müller, Romana Pavlis, Wolfgang Petschko, Hans Raumauf, Georg Riedl, Harald Riener, Martin Simhandl, Klaudia Stolitzka and Peter Thirring, the artists represented in the exhibition Unknown Familiars Iris Andraschek, Markus Bacher, Judith Fegerl, Birke Gorm, Martha Jungwirth, Barbara Kapusta, Luisa Kasalicky, Niklas Lichti, Luiza Margan, Elena Narbutaite, Evelyn Plaschg, Astrid Rausch, Marianne Vlaschits, exhibition architect Robert Müller, the gallery owners and art dealers Martin Janda, Emanuel Layr, Christian Mayer and Renate Kainer, Susanne Bauer, Eivind Furnesvik, Deniz Pekerman (Director Galerie nächst St. Stephan), Cornelis van Almsick, the collectors Diethard Leopold and Werner Trenker, the director of the MQ Bettina Leidl, Dom Museum Wien director Johanna Schwanberg, curator Dieter Buchhart, the artists Victoria Coeln, Lorenz Estermann, Johanna Kandl, Herwig Kempinger, Hubert Lobnig, Tobias Pils and Werner Reiterer, Harald Friedrich (Liechtensteinische Landesbank), Provost Anton Höslinger (Klosterneuburg Abbey), Werner Muhm, Peter Weinhäupl and Sandra Tretter (Klimt Foundation), Christoph Thun-Hohenstein (Head of Section in the Foreign Ministry), advertising expert Mariusz Demner, art historian Thomas Zaunschirm, Hans Unterdorfer (Erste Bank), lawyer Clemens Schindler, entrepreneurs Hyo-Sook Clara Song and Jieun An (World Culture Networks), Barbara Kolm (Austrian Economics Center), Stefan Ottrubay (Chairman, Esterházy Foundations), Fanny Zerz (viennacontemporary) and many more.

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