Tag: Herbert Ploberger

Herbert Ploberger: At the Interface between Fine and Applied Art

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The inclusion of lesser-known modernisms into art history at large also calls for the introduction of lesser-known artists, and it is often left to smaller, regional galleries to take on this task and produce the groundwork. The recent exhibition Herbert Ploberger: At the Interface between Fine and Applied Art at the Upper Austrian regional gallery in Linz can be understood precisely in this light.

Herbert Ploberger (1902-1977) was one of Austria’s main representatives of New Objectivity painting (Neue Sachlichkeit), a movement that developed in reaction to Expressionism in 1920s Weimar Germany. Stripping paintings bare of personal feeling and emotion, artists of the New Objectivity forged a hyperreality that often bordered on caricature for its brutal and unforgiving depictions of modern life. Continue reading →

Between War Times: Upper Austria from 1918 to 1939

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To commemorate the centenary of the First Austrian Republic in 2018, the Upper Austrian regional gallery in Linz presented a cross-section of stylistic developments and institutional frameworks of fine arts produced in Upper Austria between the two World Wars. The exhibition was part of the historical exhibition Between War Times: Upper Austria from 1918 to 1939 at the Linz Palace Museum, which runs through to January 2019 with a focus on the federal state’s position in an Austria that suffered deeply from social and political upheavals in the 1920s and 30s, and was annexed to the Third Reich in March 1938. With these historical complexities discussed elsewhere, the exhibition in the gallery focused its efforts on painting, photography and the graphic arts of the region, paying no more than faint attention to socio-political developments.

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