VOL. 28
Cranach's Holy Productivity
An Insert by Klaus Scherübel
Established in 2023, “Considering the Collection & An Insert by …” is a format presenting highlights from the collection of the Paintings Gallery of the Academy of Fine Arts, ranging from Bosch, Rembrandt and Rubens to Füger and Waldmüller, as well as works with thematic links to the focus of the Inserts, works by contemporary artists conceived as site-specific interventions relating to the historical works in the temporary exhibition. The second show in the series features an Insert by Montreal-based Austrian artist Klaus Scherübel.
Against the backdrop of his installations that engage with the museographical genre of the period room, and related conceptual works in which aspects of painting, books, sculpture, architecture and exhibition design enter into relation with one another, Klaus Scherübel’s current project deals with ways of depicting space and architecture in connection with questions of self-portraiture and strategies of productivity, as exemplified by a work by Lucas Cranach the Elder, one of the most important painters of the German Renaissance and Reformation.
The work in question is The Holy Kinship (1510–1512) from the collection of the Paintings Gallery, created by Cranach on the occasion of his marriage to Barbara Brengbier, the daughter of a patrician family. Owing to its strongly portrait-like character, art historians categorize this painting as a special form of a motif that was common until the seventeenth century: Cranach portrays himself, his wife and his father-in-law in the roles of members of the Holy Kinship. Apart from this unorthodox interweaving of the two family portraits, in which religious themes overlap with real social relations and interests, Scherübel focusses above all on the architectural setting within which the Holy Kinship is placed. This raises the question of whether and how this setting can be linked to the specific context within which the painting was made, and to the commercial aspect of Cranach’s art production.
In Room 2, a spectacular large-scale installation has been realized as a kind of stage: Cranach’s Holy Productivity VOL. 28. In this work, the schematic, set-like architectural components that structure the painting’s pictorial space are explored as a three-dimensional spatialized picture without the original work’s cast of characters. Other new works, on show in Room 1, include a digital slide show Cranach’s Holy Productivity (Opening Credits) that alludes to the radiographic processes used in museological analysis of the materials in paintings, while also parodying the sitcom genre. Another body of work deals with the collection of religious relics assembled by Frederick the Wise, as depicted in the Heiltumsbuch (1509) which was illustrated by Cranach and which Scherübel reinterprets in a media shift as a reprint. Finally, there are new works in the series Untitled (The Artist at Work) that show the researching artist on Cranach’s trail in Wittenberg.
The Insert is also situated within the context of the lengthy process of restoring and studying Cranach’s panel paintings St Valentine and a Kneeling Donator (c. 1502/1503) and The Holy Kinship (1510–1512) from the Paintings Gallery collection.
With the kind support of the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec
