The exhibition "Image & Word" illustrates the diverse and open field of tension between word and image with artworks from the collection.

“I believe every artist has to be a poet”, wrote Egon Schiele in a letter in 1918. We don’t need to go that far to recognise that the relationship between words and images has been productive since the Modernist era. The exhibition "Image & Word" will trace this diverse, open, exciting field using works from the Collection. On their search for new forms of expression and with a desire to break with convention, artists and writers in early Modernism found inspiration in neighbouring disciplines. Schiele wrote poems, inspired by the modern French poetry that was highly topical in Vienna at the turn of the century. Alfred Kubin illustrated books by Edgar Allan Poe, Hermann Hesse, Elias Canetti and others. In 1910, he himself wrote a novel. Marcel Duchamp played with words in order to question the conventions of the art world in a humorous way. His occasionally disconcerting titles played mind games. For the Dadaists, language was a core element of art: they dismembered it, created sound poems and experimented with rhythms and sonorities. The Surrealists also combined visual and linguistic elements that didn’t belong together. Using methods such as “automatic writing”, they explored their subconscious by associatively committing words, images and emotions to paper. Since the second half of the 20th century, this dialogue between words and images has continued in various forms down to the present day. For the contemporary artist Bethan Huws, for example, linguistics and language form a vital basis for her work. Her neon work “I’ve forgotten to feed the cat, I haven’t got a cat” has illuminated the Kunsthaus wall since 2020. This exhibition begins with works of Viennese Modernism and then spans an arc from the 19th century to the present day. Sometimes playful, sometimes poetic, disconcerting and humorous, it will explore the relationship between fine arts and language.

Curated by Jana Bruggmann