Klimt / Schiele: Drawings from the Albertina Museum, Vienna

London-based architecture studio IF_DO is the exhibition designer of Klimt / Schiele: Drawings from the Albertina Museum, Vienna, which has opened at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, and runs until 3 February 2019.

2018 marks the centenary of the deaths of two of the most celebrated and pioneering figures of early twentieth-century art: Gustav Klimt (1862-1918) and Egon Schiele (1890-1918). Klimt / Schiele: Drawings is the first exhibition in the UK to focus on the fundamental importance of drawing to both artists. Both Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele revelled in the immediacy of drawing, exploring new ideas of modernity, subjectivity and the erotic. The exhibition comprises over 100 unique works on paper, including portraits and self-portraits, studies for allegorical paintings, landscapes and erotic nudes. These rarely loaned works are drawn from the exceptional holdings of the Albertina’s world-renowned collection, and, following the exhibition at the Royal Academy and due to their sensitivity to light, they will not be displayed again for many years to come.

The exhibition is arranged thematically in five sections examining Klimt’s and Schiele’s often divergent, yet sometimes compellingly parallel, processes and graphic styles.

The exhibition design by IF_DO draws from both Secessionist architecture and early twentieth-century Viennese ‘Kunst Ausstellung’ (art exhibitions). Exhibition display and design during this period often played with a sense of the domestic, featuring decorative frescos and carefully placed items of furniture.

Echoing the friezes of the Kunst Ausstellung, textured paint has been applied to the gallery walls to foreshorten the ceiling height and create the effect of a more intimate domestic setting within the vertiginous gallery spaces. Elegant cherry wood and brass vitrines display sketchbooks and Secessionist pamphlets, and borrow from the language of Austrian furniture of the period, often crafted from fruit wood; a delicate cross-beam leg structure and brass-capped feet lend a sense of Viennese refinement. At the heart of the exhibition, a dramatic monolithic wall disrupts the flow of the exhibition, echoing the discomfort in the works made by Schiele during his imprisonment in 1912.

The Royal Academy of Arts exhibition marks IF_DO’s second major project within the London visual arts scene following its commission by the Dulwich Picture Gallery for its first Dulwich Pavilion in 2017, which opened the London Festival of Architecture.

IF_DO