The Villa Vauban, Luxembourg City Museum, has a collection of ancient art mainly focused on Dutch painting from the Golden Age and French history and landscape paintings from the 19th century.e century. Paintings, sculptures and engravings by European artists from the 17th centurye in the 19th centurye century complete the whole. In 2020, the museum acquired a collection of engravings dating from the 15the au XXe century. “We were asked by the family of a private collector from the Saar region to acquire a significant set of 1,300 sheets,” explains Guy Thewes, director of the 2 Museums of the City of Luxembourg. This collection was forgotten for many years. Although the collector died in the 1930s, his house was not completely emptied until 2019, when this fund was discovered in the attic. The collection was disparate and some leaves needed to be restored, but thanks to the Pelican Foundation, we were able to receive the money and the human resources necessary to carry out research and adequate restoration work.
This is how the public was able to begin to discover the richness of this collection in 2023, through the exhibition “Animals in Engraving” and in 2024 with “The Terrestrial Paradise”.
A contemporary look
“Villa Vauban regularly invites contemporary Luxembourg artists to intervene in the museum and interact with the collection. It is in this context that we invited Julie Wagener to appropriate part of the collection of engravings,” explains Guy Thewes.
The young artist (born in 1990) thus made a choice of works which caught her attention and in response to these created five screen prints which are presented opposite.
Climate crisis, right-wing politics… sensitive subjects are addressed in the work of Julie Wagener. (Photo: Marion Dessard)
“When I found myself faced with these old works, I wondered how to approach them,” explains Julie Wagener. After being a little lost in the face of the eclecticism of the themes, I refocused on subjects that usually interest me. This is how I selected engravings whose subjects relate to the human condition.”
His view thus develops a free and subjective interpretation of subjects linked to politics, economics, religion, idolatry. “I found resonances there with our consumer society or the climatic and ecological crises that we are going through,” explains the artist. In old engravings, she retains images that deal with witchcraft, the Golden Calf, peasant poverty, or the Flood. In response, she composes lithographed images that question capitalism, political drifts towards the extreme right, the failings of our consumer society and even questions linked to neocolonialism.
The Things we carry, at Villa Vauban, until March 16.
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