Vienna is home to some of the world’s most famous works of art, including Gustav Klimt’s gilded “The Kiss” (at the Belvedere Museum) and Hieronymus Bosch’s trippy triptych “The Last Judgment” (at the Academy of Fine Arts). Beyond those masterpieces, there’s much to discover this winter in the city’s eclectic lineup of special exhibitions.
Whether you’re spending the day exploring museums or you’ve got a couple of hours to go before the opera or a concert, you’ll find shows that feature Austrian artists and personalities and sharp curatorial approaches to tackling some of today’s most burning issues. Here is a sampling.
Serious Fun
Melting buildings, hollow statues, chubby cars and lots of pickles. Welcome to the eye-popping, mind-bending sculptural universe of Erwin Wurm, one of the leading Austrian artists of his generation. In his honor, the Albertina Modern is hosting “Erwin Wurm: A 70th-Birthday Retrospective,” a career-spanning survey of this relentlessly inquisitive purveyor of the absurd, whose work balances the serious with the playful. The sprawling show features several works that spectators are invited to interact with, becoming part of the sculptures themselves. Through March 9
In Season
An exhibition about the disappearance of winter because of climate change might sound like a downer, but “Winter in Vienna: The Vanishing of a Season,” at the recently renovated Wien Museum, dedicated to the city’s history, is both a tale of a bygone era and a modern appeal to tackle the challenges that come with rising temperatures. Through paintings, historical photographs, vintage advertisements and winter paraphernalia, the show explores how the Viennese have withstood the extreme cold (there are sections devoted to winter fashion and heating) and found opportunities for leisure time in skiing, sledding and ice-skating. Through March 16
Connections
Vienna is home to the world’s first Jewish Museum. Founded in 1895, the Jüdisches Museum Wien is well known for its pioneering exhibitions on Jewish history, culture and contemporary life. A new show, “The Third Generation. The Holocaust in Family Memory,” features works by Jewish artists, many separated from World War II by two generations. Their varied responses to the long shadow cast by the Holocaust are, in the words of co-curator Gabriele Kohlbauer-Fritz in the exhibition notes, “radical, forgiving, creative, despairing or religious.” Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel “Everything is Illuminated,” Claude Lanzmann’s film “Shoah” and a haunting photo and light installation by Christian Boltanski feature in an exhibit that does not shy away from painful, psychologically complex issues. Through March 16
Mastery
The Leopold Museum, which has an extensive collection of artworks by the erotically and psychologically expressive painter Egon Schiele, shines a light on another early Austrian 20th-century master of stylized, and often disturbing, portraiture, landscapes and nudes. “Rudolf Wacker: Magic and Abysses of Reality” offers a comprehensive view of Wacker, a prolific Neue Sachlichkeit, or New Objectivity, painter. Confident and chromatically bold self-portraits, intricately detailed still lifes of day-to-day objects thrown together in unexpected combinations, and uncanny studies of dolls and puppets are among the roughly 200 works of art on view in this revealing and handsomely mounted exhibition. Through Feb. 16
Visionary
In honor of what would have been her 110th birthday, Vienna pays tribute to one of its illustrious native daughters, Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler, better known to the world as Hedy Lamarr. The Vienna Furniture Museum is the unlikely venue for “Housewife, Artist, Tomboy. Hedy Lamarr 110,” which takes us through her fascinating life. The show includes her middle-class Jewish upbringing in Vienna’s Döbling district; the scandalous 1933 Czech film “Ecstasy,” in which the actress, still a teenager, appeared naked and in the throes of an orgasm, and her later successes in Hollywood. The show also covers her brilliance as an inventor: In 1942, she and the composer George Antheil patented a communications system called frequency hopping, designed for military use. Nowadays, it is acknowledged as a precursor to Wi-Fi, GPS and Bluetooth. Through March 2
The post Museum Shows to See in Vienna This Winter appeared first on New York Times.