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Considering the Collection & The Day You Were Thinking About the Sibyl While You Were Picking Autumn Leaves An Insert by Ana Torfs

Datum
Event Label
Exhibition
Organisational Units
Paintings Gallery
Location Address (1)
Schillerplatz 3, 1st floor
Location ZIP and/or City (1)
1010 Vienna

The format Considering the Collection & An Insert by … features highlights from the collection of the Paintings Gallery as well as installations and groups of works conceived as inserts by contemporary artists and incorporated into the temporary arrangement from the permanent collection. The insert by Belgian artist Ana Torfs is the third presentation in this series.

Entitled The Day You Were Thinking About the Sibyl While You Were Picking Autumn Leaves, Ana Torfs’s new cycle of works consists of 28 Jacquard tapestries and 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.
Torfs’s works were produced in collaboration with TextielLab, the specialist workshop of the TextielMuseum Tilburg.

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.

Works by Willem van Aelst, Friedrich von Amerling, Herri met de Bles, Hieronymus Bosch, Dieric Bouts, Joos van Cleve, Lucas Cranach the Elder, Anthony van Dyck, Barent Fabritius, Heinrich Friedrich Füger, Jan Fyt, Luca Giordano, Jan van Goyen, Jean-Baptiste Greuze, Hans Baldung Grien, Jacob Jordaens, Johann Baptist von Lampi the Younger, Nicola Malinconico, Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, Martin Ferdinand Quadal, Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn, Peter Paul Rubens, Jacob van Ruisdael, Isaack van Ruisdael, Pierre Subleyras, Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller and others

Curated by Claudia Koch

Opening hours 
Daily except Monday
10–18 h

T +43 1 588 16 2201 
F +43 1 588 16 2299 
kunstsammlungen@akbild.ac.at 

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List of entries

  • Schillerplatz/ Aula

    Paintings Gallery

    an orange leave in front of a grey white black background
  • Guided tour

    in the exhibition
    The Day You Were Thinking About the Sibyl
    While You Were Picking Autumn Leaves

    An Insert by Ana Torfs
    with Sabine Folie, curator, and Ana Torfs, artist (in English)

    Schillerplatz

    Paintings Gallery

    orange leave on a black and white background on a jacquard loom
  • Sunday tour

    Overview tour through the exhibition Considering the Collection & The Day You Were Thinking About the Sibyl While You Were Picking Autumn Leaves An Insert by Ana Torfs

    Schillerplatz

    Paintings Gallery

    a few paintings on red and grey walls in an exhibition room
  • Sunday tour

    Overview tour through the exhibition Considering the Collection & The Day You Were Thinking About the Sibyl While You Were Picking Autumn Leaves An Insert by Ana Torfs

    Schillerplatz

    Paintings Gallery

    a few paintings on red and grey walls in an exhibition room
  • Sunday tour

    Overview tour through the exhibition Considering the Collection & The Day You Were Thinking About the Sibyl While You Were Picking Autumn Leaves An Insert by Ana Torfs

    Schillerplatz

    Paintings Gallery

    a few paintings on red and grey walls in an exhibition room