Svenja Deininger, Nilbar Güreş, Július Koller: Unknown Familiars. The Vienna Insurance Group Collections

Nilbar Güres, Ergen Odasi / Adolescent Room, 2014, textile colour, textile, pearls, embroidery on red fabric, Photo: Markus Wörgötter

On the occasion of the 200th anniversary of Wiener Städtische Versicherungsverein, the main shareholder of the Vienna Insurance Group, Unknown Familiars brings together all six collections of the Group, which encounter each other, their different focuses and histories of development, for the first time. It is in this regard that they are unknown familiars – related, though with never having met before. The collections now complement each other in a precise selection of works, the presentation of which occupies an entire floor of the Leopold Museum, comprising over two hundred works of various genres from different periods. Young, contemporary art meets the modernism of the interwar period; the avant-garde of the 1970s meets contemporary Austrian positions. Starting out from the collection of the Czech Kooperativa – represented with a selection of works from the period from 1900 to 1950 – a network of thematic and stylistic references [...]