"Egon Schiele and Richard Lindner:
METAphysics of the body"

The Museum of Printed Graphics - a new private museum on the art map of Moscow - presents the exhibition project Egon Schiele and Richard Lindner: METAphysics of the body from February 7 to May 10, 2020.

The exhibition will include graphic works by Egon Schiele - one of the most shocking artists in the history of art, the brightest representative of Austrian expressionism; as well as the work of American-German artist Richard Lindner, whose work many art lovers will get to know for the first time. The exposition of lithographs will be complemented by a rug woven by Lindner in the 1970s, as well as objects created specifically for the project by young contemporary authors.

The curators of the project had a difficult task: within the framework of a single exhibition space, not only to combine or contrast two large-scale personalities of artists of the 20th century, but to try to penetrate into the inner world of each and find common ground between the dramatically broken images of one and the bright grotesque images of the other. Between expressionism and cubism, between the origins of pop art and contemporary performance.

In his famous image of the Vitruvian Man, Leonardo da Vinci showed how the divine design is reflected in the structure of the human body. To his drawing, as a standard, artists of all times return. In classical art, the beauty of a naked human body is the embodiment of the harmony of the universe, the perfection of nature. In the XX century, there is a radical revision of this, one of the central, themes in Western art. Painting, philosophy and psychoanalysis, give the body a new special status. The body and body become the object of artistic reflection and experiment. A whole series of questions come to the fore: what is considered beautiful and ugly, permissible and inadmissible in the image of the body? What is the relationship between the body and what moves it (soul, consciousness, unconscious)? The boundaries of the image of the body are becoming more and more mobile, the paradigm is changing from “body as an object”, as an object of contemplation in the academic sense, to “body subject”.

Both artists - the heroes of the exhibition - explored the nature of the human body.

Egon Schiele (1890 - 1918) - an incomparable draftsman, a fighter for complete artistic freedom, he inquisitively takes up the study of the human body, with the help of which he seeks to extract the caches of his soul to the surface. Schiele was able to present the viewer a different nudity and make him think about the deepest instincts of the human essence. Egon Schiele today is an absolutely cult person. For such a short life and creative period, he was able to take a turning point in art and have a significant impact on modern performative bodily practices.

Richard Lindner (1901 - 1978) - artist, illustrator and graphic designer, musician. Lindner’s work became an integral part of the world of pop art, he was the author of several iconic images, such as the covers of the book “Anti-Oedipus” (1972) by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari and one of John Lennon’s favorite artists (The Beatles cover “Yellow Submarine”). His artistic style received a special term - “mechanical cubism”, where grotesque and characteristic images are a symbiosis of the human body and mechanical parts. Richard Lindner represented the residents of the metropolis as a new bodily constructor with feelings, emotions and moods. He anticipated the advent of the cyberpunk genre for decades.