Exhibition
Alfred Kubin: 1897-1909
Sep 25, 2008 — Jan 26, 2009
The exhibition featured over 100 works on paper by the artist Alfred Kubin.
Alfred Kubin
Charon, 1902–03
Pen and ink on paper
Private Collection
Alfred Kubin
Charon, 1902–03
Pen and ink on paper
Private Collection
On September 25, 2008, Neue Galerie New York will open the exhibition “Alfred Kubin: Drawings, 1897-1909,” featuring over 100 works on paper by the artist Alfred Kubin. This is the first major museum show of his work ever held in the United States, and it focused on his nightmarish early works on paper. The exhibition was organized by Annegret Hoberg, curator of the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich.
“Kubin plumbs the depths of the shadow world of the human subconscious, with its unguarded impulses and fears,” said Renée Price, Director of the Neue Galerie. “His drawings have the evanescence and the frightening clarity of our darkest dreams.”
Though a contemporary of artist Gustav Klimt and designer Josef Hoffmann, fellow Austrian Alfred Kubin (1877-1959) eschewed the decorative impulses found in their work. Instead, inspired by the art of James Ensor, Francisco Goya, Max Klinger, Edvard Munch, and Félicien Rops, Kubin produced dark, hallucinatory visions of violence and eroticism. Literature served as an inspiration as well, and Kubin drew from the masterpieces of Fyodor Dostoevsky, Nikolai Gogol, and Edgar Allan Poe. Illustrations from Kubin’s bizarre 1908 novel The Other Side will be included in the exhibition.