13.03.2024 – 17.04.2024
The art cell, a former telephone box in the inner courtyard, is the smallest exhibition space in the WUK – and the venue for Elena Riener’s work Memento.
Memento is a reinterpretation of the theme of vanitas in floral still lifes.
Flowers were already important in the visual arts in antiquity, were found early on in architecture and book illustrations, and were a popular motif in nature studies. In the late Renaissance, bouquets of flowers were found in the first still lifes and described wealth and prosperity.
Flower still lifes were particularly common in the Dutch Renaissance, as the Netherlands celebrated economic success with the hybridisation of tulip bulbs. It reached its “heyday” in the Baroque period. When transience and its aesthetics were discovered in the late Baroque period, wilting flowers were painted as instructive vanitas still lifes (Latin for “empty appearance, nothingness, vanity”) with memento mori motifs (Latin for “be aware of mortality”).
In their withering, flowers show us transience, the cycle of life and change. In this sense, they also give us hope.
Elena Riener – Memento
13.03.2024 – 17.04.2024
Kunstzelle, WUK Vienna
Währinger Straße 59
1090 Vienna
www.wuk.at
