The Bank Austria Kunstforum Wien is presenting the first retrospective in Austria dedicated the work of the enigmatic Polish-French painter Balthasar Klossowksi de Rola, called Balthus (1908-2001).Best known for his sexualized pictures of adolescent girls, Balthus was a reclusive, self-taught artist who worked outside of the avant-garde movements of the day, preferring a more realist style.Inspired in his youth by the Tuscan Renaissance and especially by Piero della Francesca, he developed his own version of Modernism, putting a subversive spin on the conventions of classicism.At a time when figurative art was widely ignored, Balthus embraced the traditional categories of figurative European painting – landscapes, still lifes, narrative scenes, and portraits.His disparate range of influences included the art of the Renaissance, the writings of Emily Brontë and Lewis Carroll, as well as psychoanalytic theory.“The real isn’t what you think you see. One can be a realist of the unreal and a figurative painter of the invisible,” Balthus once said.“I have always felt the need to search for the extraordinary in the ordinary, to suggest and not determine, always to leave something enigmatic in my pictures,” he explained.The exhibition at the Bank Austria Kunstforum aims to cast new light on Balthus’s work, anchoring Balthus’s oeuvre within all the influences that affected it.It traces his career from his early inspiration from the quattrocento, to the works surrounding Surrealism and Neue Sachlichkeit, and finally to his preoccupation with East Asian art.“His mysterious, archaic and uncanny images seem to conjure up, among other things, the fantasies of childhood, while not avoiding a certain cruelty,” the Bank Austria Kunstforum states.“Balthus” is at the Bank Austria Kunstforum Wien until June 19, 2016
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