2023-05-04 10:30:35
The location gave the name: Lentos, the Celtic term means “lying at the bend of the river”. And the Lentos Art Museum of the City of Linz has stood on the banks of the Danube for two decades. On May 18, 2003, after 29 months of construction, “Austria’s most beautiful museum”, as Klaus Albrecht Schröder, head of the Albertina and native of Linz, called it at the time, was opened according to a design by Swiss architects Weber & Hofer. The “20 Years Lentos Party” will take place on May 25th.
In 2003, the architects received the Austrian Builders’ Prize for their work. The three-storey building is 130 meters long and 21 meters wide. An area of 60 meters was left out on the ground floor, creating a covered outdoor area. The concrete building was covered with a glass skin that reflects the surroundings during the day. Lamps mounted behind the glass illuminate the museum in different colors at night.
The creation of this new art space had become necessary because the New Gallery of the City of Linz had become too small. The federal government did not contribute a cent to the 33 million euro construction costs, which angered the then mayor Franz Dobusch (SPÖ), his ÖVP deputy Reinhard Dyk and the museum director Peter Baum. Because they found the “Vienna-centricity of the federal museums unbearable”, no member of the government was invited to the opening. At the municipal level, she feels “respect and recognition” for the artistic work, says current director Hemma Schmutz.
Baum transferred 1,320 works from the areas of painting, sculpture and object art, 10,000 drawings, watercolours, etchings, lithographs and around 500 photographic art works from the Neue Galerie to the Lentos. The basic stock essentially goes back to the collection of the Berlin art dealer Wolfgang Gurlitt.
The long-standing director Stella Rollig made the Lentos an important museum of modern and contemporary art in Austria before moving to the Belvedere in Vienna as general director in 2017. Since then, dirt has been running the house on the Danube. One of her guidelines is to ensure a balanced presentation between artists. That “strategy”, which was followed by its predecessor, has proven that it is possible to push contemporary female artists. They have established themselves as “important positions within art history”. This is also reflected in the prices of the works. And around 15 years after the “Helene Funke” exhibition in 2007, “we now lend out her works on an ongoing basis,” says Schmutz happily.
In terms of content, the interwar artist Jean Egger, the Haus-Rucker-Co collective and a show about siblings as well as Cornelia Gurlitt – cousin of Wolfgang Gurlitt – and Anton Kolig are on the program for the anniversary year.
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