der zustand liebe

anatomicalesque

Down in the belly of the Leopold Museum in Vienna, I discovered an artist I had never heard of— Hermann Nitsch. Nitsch is an Austrian artist best known for his controversial and often gorey multimedia and performance pieces, which explore ritual, religion and violence. Playing on screens in the gallery space, these bloody pieces were quite compelling (and a little nauseating), but what really caught my attention were his enormous, layered, anatomical drawings, which reminded me of the Lubos Plny exhibit I came across last year in Istanbul, with the layers of organs, lines and red. As you know, I go weak in the knees for a beautiful line, and my heart flutters for anatomical drawings and sculpture (once upon a time, I nearly entered the world of science and medicine), so Hermann Nitsch really spoke to me.



Just look at those layers of lines!

an untold story

I seem to have misplaced the envelope upon which I scrawled the artists' names... I remember it was in brown ink (the last image is Sleepless, by Paul Nestlang). Unimpressed by much of the work in The Excitement Continues exhibit at the Leopold Museum, these beautiful three really stood out and grabbed me— and don't you think they tell a story when placed together like this?

schiele's hands

There's a feeling you get inside when you stand in front of the work of an admired artist, and are finally able to examine the brushstrokes and smudges, the weight of a line, and the changes in direction in a bleed of colour. I have long been pulled toward the often grotesque, distorted figures of Egon Schiele, and as I stood in front of the Leopold Museum in Vienna, the cold reddening my nose, I felt a tremor in my chest, knowing that what I had studied in awe from books, would at last be a breath's distance away.

I felt submerged in a dark sea, muddy-coloured fish surrounding me, with piercing eyes— their elongated skeletal forms, twisting and coiling, erotic and disturbing. What captured me most were their hands— stretched, knobby-knuckled fingers like tree branches, so expressive, so real. The entire painting, held in these hands.