VIENNA.- In 1908, Adolf Loos wrote his famous essay „Ornament and Crime“, declaring embellishing ornament to be merely superfluous decoration. The ban proclaimed against this extremely harmonious formal language, this intersection between high art and folklore, prevailed for almost a century. Only since the turn of the millenium ornament has re-established itself: as decorative and yet subversive and allusive elements, abstract and floral patterns adorn and dominate works in the contemporary visual arts.

The exhibition at the Belvedere ’s Orangery – presenting artists from the turn of the century to the present, from Austria and Germany (Adriana Czernin, Maria Hahnenkamp, Brigitte Kowanz, Raimund Pleschberger, Esther Stocker, Jörn Stoya), the USA and Great Britain (Sarah Morris, Philip Taaffe), India (Sakshi Gupta, Raqib Shaw, Hema Upadhyay), Pakistan (Aisha Khalid, Imran Qureshi, Rashid Rana), Lebanon (Mona Hatoum) and Iran (Parastou Forouhar, Shirin Neshat, Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian) – demonstrates yesterday’s and today’s power of ornament, a juxtaposition of Art Nouveau artists with contemporary artistic accomplishments.

Gustav Klimt’s Water Snakes, textile designs by Josef Hoffmann, and Carl Otto Czeschka’s illustrations for the Song of the Nibelungs constitute a starting point for the attempt to define today’s relevance of ornament. How do ornamental patterns define space, how does ornamental form fill surfaces, is ornament mere decoration or rather a post-modern, even global language oscillating between tradition and criticism? If these patterns illustrate a world full of illusion, as they did around 1900, today they also always stand for the concept of a totalitarian system. The slightest deviation will destroy a pattern’s harmony – an observation addressed by Parastou Forouhar (Teheran/Frankfurt) in her critical review of the political history of her native country Iran. Sakshi Gupta and Hema Upadhyay from India employ patterns in order to ponder about feminism and ethnic attributions. With his elaborate golden ornaments, Raqib Shaw, who now lives in London, establishes connections with the tradition of Islamic pictorial languages, but incorporates worms and instruments of torture, thus constantly breaking up a superficial harmony. Adriana Czernin (Vienna) depicts her women as captives of ornament attempting to break free from its symmetry. Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, the grande dame of Iranian art, translates Persian pictorial language into plain modern forms by making use of mirror mosaics, thus irritating the clarity of rectangles. The painter Philip Taaffe from New York studies ornaments from different cultures, superimposing them upon each other in almost psychedelic entanglement – a network of forms, a webbing of global ornament.

Ornaments encompass history and the present, they are full of symbols and allusions, they bespeak beauty and seduction, and they also always refer to society and gender – the way reality is constructed.