VIENNA.- For the first time ever, the Albertina is staging an exhibition on two levels of the museum: over 2,500 square meters of floor space have been devoted to a presentation that bears witness to the Albertina’s collecting strategy for contemporary art since Klaus Albrecht Schröder’s assumption of its directorship.

From the over 10,000 contemporary artworks that have been acquired over the past 18 years, Klaus Albrecht Schröder and curator Antonia Hoerschelmann have selected around 350 works by 55 artists.

Clear to see in their selection is the intent to acquire not isolated works, but—wherever possible—groups of works, thereby facilitating a more nuanced and complex understanding of the artistic ideas and creative principles behind a given artist’s oeuvre.

As a rule, the collecting policy for the Contemporary Art Collection is to acquire only drawings and prints. But even so, the Albertina’s contemporary art holdings have also come to include hundreds of paintings. Numerous artists have donated important paintings to the museum in order to be represented here in the totality of their output: these artists, after all, regard drawings, printed graphics, and paintings simply as different forms in which to express the same individual artistic concepts and ideas.

Although the central aim of this large-scale presentation is to provide a glimpse into the Albertina’s collecting strategy over the past two decades, its structure is threefold: according to themes (nudes, political activism, serial concepts), then according to artistic aspects (Pop and Minimal), and finally with an eye to monographic considerations (Gottfried Helnwein or Alex Katz).

In making their selection, Klaus Albrecht Schröder and Antonia Hoerschelmann have explicitly abstained from value-judgements: “It would be no problem for us to present several comparable exhibitions without repeating a single work nor making any compromises in terms of quality or the individual works’ significance,” says Hoerschelmann. “Happily, we’ve already been able to introduce several of the artists (whom we therefore haven’t included in this showing), and we’re currently working on further contemporary art exhibitions.” Part of the museum’s collecting strategy is the continual acquisition of works by individual artists over many years, emphasises Klaus Albrecht Schröder: “Continuity is what sets museums apart from galleries. We believe in and are loyal to individual artists, collecting and presenting them repeatedly and in diverse contexts.”