The catalogue is published on occasion of the exhibition ‘The Purloined Masterpiece. Images as Time Machines’ at the Paintings Gallery of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.

The catalogue is published on occasion of the exhibition ‘The Purloined Masterpiece. Images as Time Machines’ at the Paintings Gallery of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.

The exhibition contrasts the common practice of the permanent collection with a transhistorical model that allows the Academy’s historical art collections – Gemäldegalerie, Kupferstichkabinett, and Glyptothek – to enter into conversation with contemporary works.

Drawing on the richness of the collections, the exhibition picks out a selection of the many possible pictorial programs, typologies, and allegorical formulas that the collections provide to loosely interweave with other works from other periods.

In-depth essays on the themes of the ship/the sea, the trompe l’oeil, visual cognition from 1500 to 1700, the frame, and subject constitutions in the context of social and technological changes over the centuries and their reflection in the pictorial image are interwoven with impressive exhibition views.

English and German text.

Published on occasion of the exhibition ‘The Purloined Masterpiece. Images as Time Machines’, 8 Apr 2022 –29 Jan 2023, Paintings Gallery of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.