Restless Glance - The Unicredit Group Collection at the Bank Austria Kunstforum. (en) - a podcast by CastYourArt.com

Restless Glance - The Unicredit Group Collection

Faced with the challenge of representing a recently merged corporate collection comprised of over 60,000 works, curator Walter Guadagnini went back to the basic questions concerning art: Why is art important? What role does it play in society? How does it relate to our everyday life? As the art community becomes ever more global, how can we encompass the vastly diverse range of art that is presented to us?

The exhibition, “PastPresentFuture”, at the Bank Austria Kunstforum, is an introduction to the UniCredit Group art collection, which now includes the combined collections of all the individual banks that have merged into UniCredit, including UniCredit in Italy, HypoVereinsbank in Germany, and Bank Austria, thereby making it one of the most valuable corporate collections in Europe.

Such a massive task might invite opportunities for grandstanding pricey acquisitions, or showing off pieces from well-known names. However, this exhibition chooses instead to cast a dynamic, multilayered glance at the past, present, and future, and takes advantage of a voluminous, eclectic collection by featuring pieces which create dialogues, reveal unexpected parallels, and take us back to the way art relates to everyday life, its original and fundamental raison d’etre.

Instead of taking a chronological approach, the exhibition is divided into sections that juxtapose pieces from diverse periods into various thematic groups. In representing a collection that encompasses so many periods, genres, mediums, countries, and artists, it is striking how it is the subjects which are covered that bring all these works to a mutual level. Faces, landscapes, objects: whether they are depicted in a 17th century Italian Baroque painting or a 20th century British found-art installation, these pieces still speak to each other as well as to us.

Whether we are looking at the past through the present or from the present toward the future, “every work of art in the moment it is created is contemporary”, says Guadagnini, and by demonstrating how common threads exist between ancient and contemporary works, this collection shows us how the universal and enduring concerns of society, are, and will always be reflected in great and true art. (jn)

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