Curator’s tour

The insert by Belgian artist Ana Torfs is the third presentation in the series Considering the Collection & An Insert by … in the Paintings Gallery, where Ana Torfs’s new cycle of works consists of 28 Jacquard tapestries is being shown to the public for the first time.

On her walks during the time of the momentous Covid pandemic, the artist collected all sorts of brightly coloured autumn leaves, a process that reminded her of the Cumaean Sybil in Virgil’s ancient epic The Aeneid, who would write her prophecies on leaves. Torfs dries the collected leaves between the pages of international ‘dailies’. She then photographs these arrangements and finally has them woven into large-format tapestries, supplemented with personal anaphors, verse-like sayings. The texts and images combined in this way form a fragmentary tableau on the state of our world as it is today. The lyrical fabric confers to the fleeting nature of quotidian life an alleged permanence through the medium of textiles, emphasising the nature of a historically memorable present whose repercussions on the future are unforeseeable. Just as the breeze scattered the leaves after the Sybil’s prophecy, it seems impossible to draw any reliable prospects for action from the incessant flow of media broadcasts. And given the possibilities offered by manipulative digital techniques, news events remain increasingly Sibylline and, indeed, enigmatic.

Pandemic events such as the Black Death have always accompanied art history against the backdrop of end-times eschatology. Depictions of Sibyls have been a popular motif in art history; indeed, they represent an iconographic and mythological tradition that can be seen from the historical perspective of the ever-shifting evaluation of female prophecy.

Ana Torfs’s installation is juxtaposed with historical works from the Art Collections of the Academy and the Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien.

Curated by Sabine Folie and Synne Genzmer

Considering the Collection ... focuses on works from the Baroque period, first and foremost from the legacy of Anton Franz de Paula Count Lamberg-Sprinzenstein in 1822, and on works from the ambit of Vienna’s Academy of Fine Arts around 1800. On display alongside popular masterpieces such as Anthony van Dyck’s Self-Portrait, Samuel van Hoogstraten’s Trompe l’Oeil Still Life, Bartolomé Esteban Murillo’s Young Boys Playing Dice and Martin Ferdinand Quadal’s Life Class at the Vienna Art Academy in the St Anne Building are rarely seen works that include Forest Landscape with Pond by Jacob van Ruisdael, The Peddler by Godfried Schalcken, and Self-Portrait by Friedrich von Amerling. There are repeatedly references between the paintings in the collection and the 28 tapestries by Ana Torfs, divided into four sections of seven pieces each.

Curated by Claudia Koch