Art on Mon­day af­ter­noon: The sto­ry of Aby War­burg’s pic­tu­re at­las

With Saskia Goldschmid, Graphische Sammlung ETH Zürich¨
Not every depiction of the iconic scene of Adam and Eve is "innocent", each Judith triumphs over Holofernes in a different way. There are some "femmes fatales" with telling attributes: naked women squatting on severed male heads, ladies with sexy gloves and divas with Mercedes stars instead of nipples. The planned exhibition is about striking gestures and postures, but also about grandiose and bizarre over-stagings of banal things. From the Middle Ages through the Romantic period to the present day, the varieties of fetishistic mechanisms in the arts are to be explored: prints by Barthel Beham, Wenzel Hollar, Odilon Redon and Max Klinger stand alongside works by Urs Lüthi, Louise Bourgeois, Robert Gober and Sylvie Fleury - always under the aspect of the artistic search for different codes of sexuality and new forms of allegories. Together with cultural scientist Elisabeth Bronfen, we went through the holdings of the Graphic Collection. We were able to identify thematic constants and surprising parallels over the centuries, which will be demonstrated in the style of Aby Warburg's legendary iconographic studies.