Galerie Elisabeth & Klaus Thoman curated by Max Hollein
„Little Nemo“

Max Hollein has been the director of the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt since 2001, and director of the Städel Museum as well as the Liebieghaus Skulpturensammlung since January 2006. During 1995 and 2000 he worked at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, from 1998 onward, as Chief of Staff and Manager of European Relations. Max Hollein was general commissioner and curator of the American pavilion at the 7th Venice Architecture Biennale in 2000, general commissioner and curator of the Austrian pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2005 and 2006 curator of the avant-garde festival “kontra.com” in Salzburg. He is a member of various supervisory and advisory boards of cultural institutions worldwide, including the State Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the Istanbul Modern Museum, the Neue Galerie in New York. He has curated numerous shows and published a large number of exhibition catalogues and a wide spectrum of other writings on contemporary art, modern art, and museum management.

THE BED – BERTH OF IMAGINATION The Century of the Bed as the central theme of curated by_vienna underscores the function of the bed as workplace—as a manifestation of the dissolution of boundaries between the phases of work and leisure, and of day- and nighttime activity. The bed is a ritualistic, existential surface for work and life, as represented very early on by Walter Pichler’s Schlafsaal, but it is also most especially a symbolic place for dream-based insight, as reflected by Hans Hollein’s Freud Couch. Accordingly, in the scope of the exhibition, the bed is viewed as a symbol of associative, surreal thought and opulent, creative agency—a free zone for allowing daydreams, the subconscious, and extrasensory experiences to run their course. Most of all, one particular outstanding artistic merit provides a comprehensive framework: Little Nemo in Slumberland is the revolutionary, trendsetting comic series by Winsor McCay that was published in the newspaperThe New York Herald from 1905 to 1911. With an unequalled capacity for imagination, McCay cultivated fascinating dream journeys to slumberland that are characterized by impressive visual opulence and creative transformation of reality—a reality that becomes aesthetically shifted, skewed, distended, and mutated. The bed as a synonym for “creative thought while reclining,” for the playful, the absurd, the strange, for the ability to allow dreams and idiosyncrasy to emerge, for giving ideas free rein. In this way, beyond physical and aesthetic norms, artworks of immense suggestive power and corporeal sensitivity are created; objects by which certainty dissipates and something new takes form. In the scope of spectacular spatial architecture inspired by Winsor McCay, this will be exemplified through selected works from the Galerie Thoman by the artists Julia Bornefeld, Tal R, Thomas Feuerstein, Bruno Gironcoli, Erwin Wurm, Franz West, and John Armleder. Max Hollein Works by following artists are exhibited: John M Armleder, Julia Bornefeld, Thomas Feuerstein, Bruno Gironcoli, Hans Hollein, Winsor McCay, Walter Pichler, Tal R, Franz West and Erwin Wurm.