Klimt, Schiele, Kokoschka and the body in contemporary art" at MUVEC

After exhibitions dedicated to Kandinsky, Chagall, Matisse, and Munch in recent years, the Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia continues its exhibition series in Mestre with this exhibition focused on the protagonists of the Viennese Secession — Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, and Oskar Kokoschka —, curated by Elisabetta Barisoni and featuring works from the collection of the Galleria Internazionale d’Arte Moderna of Ca’ Pesaro. The exhibition starts from the artists' ability to investigate the human soul through the body, presented directly and sometimes brutally: Klimt's refined and restless nudes, which dialogue with the reflections of the early 20th century between art, psychology, and literature; Schiele's emaciated and almost dehumanized bodies, traversed by nascent psychoanalysis; and Kokoschka's vibrant and expressionist painting, which translates the anxieties of an era on the eve of World War I. The route traces a common thread between the philosophy, psychoanalysis, anthropology, and visual arts of fin-de-siècle Vienna — described by Karl Kraus as a “laboratory for the end of the world” — and the artistic revolutions of the 1960s and 70s, from Nouveau Réalisme to Body Art, showing how the body remains a central battleground also in contemporary art, from Piero Manzoni's living sculptures to Yves Klein's anthropometries, through the political performances of Ana Mendieta and Gina Pane.