黑料不打烊

鈥淚 believe every artist has to be a poet鈥�, wrote Egon Schiele in a letter in 1918. We don鈥檛 need to go that far to recognise that the relationship between images and words has been productive since the Modernist era. The exhibition 鈥淚mage & Word鈥� 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 1909, 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鈥檛 belong together. Using methods such as 鈥渁utomatic writing鈥�, they explored their subconscious by associatively committing words, images and emotions to paper. Since the second half of the 20th century, this dialogue between images and words 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 鈥淚鈥檝e forgotten to feed the cat, I haven鈥檛 got a cat鈥� 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.