By inviting illustrator Julie Wagener to draw from five centuries of prints, Villa Vauban takes a critical and offbeat look at the emergencies of today’s world.
This is the third time that Villa Vauban has exhibited to the public part of the impressive set of prints acquired in 2020 from the family of a private collector from Saarland. After being interested in the representation of fauna, in 2023, then of paradise in all its forms (from the ideal landscape to biblical and philosophical expressions) last summer-autumn, this new temporary hanging from the series “Villa on Paper”, visible until March 16, deals with the human condition, even taking on a gently militant aspect, through original works by Julie Wagener. And for good reason: “The Things We Carry” explores the struggles and dangers of our time through imagery that echoes the concerns of times gone by.
To create the exhibition, Villa Vauban invited the 34-year-old Luxembourg illustrator to browse the new collection of some 1,300 engravings dating from the 15th century.e au XXe century – in the museum’s digital archives first, most of the works on paper are still currently the subject of research and restoration work. She chose around twenty, which she structured around themes that were as diverse as they were urgent, and eminently political. Thus, by appropriating this collection which gives pride of place to Germanic engraving specialists – with works signed Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528), Johann Sadeler (1550-1600), Johann Jakob Frey (1681-1752) or Käthe Kollwitz (1867-1945) – it is a shift in the gaze, even a deconstruction of images, that Julie Wagener, transformed into an ephemeral commissioner, wants to perform.
Critical evocation of the world
The scenes, however, are already for the most part eloquent: there is the chaos that haunts the Destruction of humanity by the floodby Johann Sadeler, just like the desolation of Landscape with a farm by Franz Edmund Weirotter (1733-1771), evoke the current climatic catastrophe. The four horsemen of the apocalypse illustrated by Hans Röhm (1877-1956) and suggested by Andreas Gering (1892-1957) refer to the devastation caused by wars, while the emaciated horses of the Dutchman Nicolaes Visscher (1618-1679 ) and the Franconian Land by Rudolf Schiestl (1878-1931) allude to the domination of man over his fellow human beings and over nature.
It is precisely because the images are so telling that they invoke the freedom to be interpreted and diverted, the whole ultimately forming a critical evocation of the world. What we find, for example, in the portrait ofA cook and his wife by Albrecht Dürer, the full bellies of the characters functioning as an allegory of overconsumption; in counterpoint, the Beggar by Georg Ort (1888-1958), or the striking scenes of poverty-stricken lives by Käthe Kollwitz take a powerful and tangible look at the effects of ultraliberalism.
-“Nothing is safe, sacred or healthy”
With the prints she selected, Julie Wagener enriches and completes the discourse with a series of five screen prints produced for the exhibition, taking up its title in passing. The central illustration, which represents two characters whose heads are replaced by flames, asserts that “nothing is safe, sacred or healthy”. The generational anxieties linked to overpowering capitalism (cult of money, programmed impoverishment of populations, rise of the extreme right, exponential exploitation of resources, rejection of independent and committed culture in favor of a prefabricated culture, etc.) are declined in as many ways. motifs that make up his original works, as a reinterpretation, using a contemporary pictorial language, of what five centuries of art can evoke.
We can imagine, as a final mirror, that the illustrator, or even the museum itself, become symbols within some of these works, such as Temptationsublime expressionist and menacing lithograph by Heinrich Kuch (1893-1976), or The Artists by Adolf Schinnerer (1876-1949), representing a tightrope walker entertaining a crowd at the risk of his life. In both cases, we see a parable of what was already, at the time of their realization – the 1920s – the danger of new populisms. And if one idea emerges from this subjective and disturbing journey through five centuries of art and struggles, it is that history seems to repeat itself.
Until March 16. Villa Vauban – Luxembourg.
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