The Body Electric: Erwin Osen – Egon Schiele

focus Exhibition in ViEnna 1900

16th April 2021–26th September 2021
LEVEL 3

The focus exhibition The Body Electric: Erwin Osen – Egon Schiele, shown in the context of the permanent presentation Vienna 1900 at the Leopold Museum, is dedicated to the little known depictions of patients in medical institutions created by Erwin Dominik Osen (1891–1970) and his friend Egon Schiele (1890–1918). The exhibition is centered on portraits of patients created by Osen which were recently discovered among the estate of the electropathologist Stefan Jellinek (1871–1968) and acquired by the Leopold Museum. Osen was a companion and model to Schiele as well as a co-founder of the artists’ association Neukunstgruppe. The drawings, executed in 1915 at Vienna’s Garrison Hospital II under Jellinek, are juxtaposed with Osen’s portraits of patients from the psychiatric hospital Am Steinhof, created in 1913 and commissioned by the general practitioner Adolf Kronfeld (1861-1938), as well as with the depictions of pregnant women and newborns Egon Schiele was able to create in 1910 with the support of the gynecologist Erwin von Graff (1878-1952) at the 2nd Women’s Clinic in Vienna. The exhibition addresses questions about the works’ background of creation, about gaze and objectification, outlines the communalities in the biographies of the two artists and reflects on their contributions to a “clinical modernism”.

In his poem I Sing the Body Electric, published in 1855 in the anthology Leaves of Grass, the US poet Walt Whitman (1819–1892) celebrated our human physicality as our psyche. Whitman’s text thus prefigured Osen’s and Schiele’s interest in the human body as subject and as the medium through which we understand ourselves and our relationship with others.

SEE DIGITAL EXHIBITION

• PRESSEBILDERLISTE The Body Electric (pdf, 425 kB)

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