The other side – Tales of the unconscious

25 May – 13 August 2017

The exhibition emphasises transitions between dream and reality in present-day art. The interaction between dream and psyche, but also motifs of the fantastic, the grotesque, the tragic and the magical are expressed in works by such artists as Thomas Feuerstein, Alfred Kubin, Henrique Oliveira, Hans Op de Beeck, Markus Schinwald and Stéphane Thidet. They lead the viewer into a foreign realm full of dream-like discoveries and surprises. The exhibition’s title “The other side” references the 1909 novel of that name by the Austrian artist Alfred Kubin (1877–1959). Kubin abducts the reader into a dream world and describes a remote foreign world that is free of all premisses and demands where no wish apparently remains unfulfilled. Revealed to be an illusion, the vision dissolves into a catastrophe; the erstwhile longing of the protagonist turns into a nightmare. Alfred Kubin created a fantastic and mythical pictorial world with his prints in the early 20th century, influencing artrists from Surrealism to the present. In “The other side,” selected prints by Kubin form an historical reference point to the novel and to selected examples of contemporary art.

Curators: Jana Franze, Julia Nebenführ, René Zechlin