After years of secrecy, the Austrian collector Heidi Göess-Horten has finally given her holdings a permanent home via a new museum in Vienna.
The recently opened Heidi Horten Collection is a short walk from many of Vienna’s most famous museums, including the Leopold and the Albertina. While it pales in size and scope to those two institutions, it has already drawn large crowds since its inauguration earlier this month.
Göess-Horten has over the years amassed a 700-work collection rich in works by Franz Marc, Georg Baselitz, Marc Chagall, and Jean-Michel Basquiat, among others. But the first hang at the museum, a show called “Open,” is largely devoid of these blue-chip names. It is instead mainly given over to Austrian artists, in particular young ones with conceptual inclinations. Future shows, however, will trot out these better-known works.
Below, a look at five notable works in the inaugural hang:
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Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat, Collaboration (Paramount), 1984–85
Image Credit: ©Heidi Horten Collection, Bildrecht, Wien 2022 It was considered a momentous event when Andy Warhol returned to painting in the mid-’80s, doing so not on his own but with the help of then-25-year-old Jean-Michel Basquiat. Together, the two would create a series of paintings that meshed their two styles — Warhol represented by painted symbols appropriated from pop culture, Basquiat by his faux naive figures.
The mixture can clearly be seen in this work where the logo for the film studio Paramount appears to act as a background for black figures with little more than a few brushstrokes for facial features.
The series’ purpose was multifold. On the one hand, it marked a new chapter in Warhol’s quest to destabilize what it means to be an author, since he now involved a collaborator who completed the piece alongside him. On the other, it saw an elder of the New York art scene essentially passing the torch to a younger protégé. But the power dynamics were uneven and some read the series as a last-ditch attempt by an aging white artist whose fame had waned to leech some of the social capital of a younger artist of color.
Despite the potentially unsavory implications of their collaboration, Warhol and Basquiat’s paintings have been seen widely, most notably in a 2018 Warhol retrospective that appeared at the Whitney Museum.
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Lena Henke, UR Mutter, 2019
Image Credit: ©Lena Henke Göess-Horten has long had a passion for animals and the opening hang includes a sculpture of an ape courtesy of Claude Lalanne, a wall-hung rug featuring hybrid creatures courtesy of Ulrike Müller, and a painting composed of dead butterflies courtesy of Damien Hirst.
The most striking critter is this oversized pig crafted by Lena Henke. The German artist named the work after a Jungian archetype referring to a fertility goddess. Ironically, however, a man may view that great being as a sloppy, slovenly animal such as a pig, as Henke points out. Drenched in white paint that causes it to appear crusty, this purple pig is hardly venerated. If anything, the animal has been dirtied by the poor conditions in which it is kept by human society. Still, it marches onward.
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Philipp Timischl, Drip/Drop, 2020
Image Credit: Alex Greenberger/ARTnews Perhaps the strangest animal in the opening hang of Göess-Horten’s collection is the dancing dog that stands on its hind legs and shakes its hips at various points in this work by Philipp Timischl.
The young Austrian artist has mulled the pervasive flow of odd digital imagery in his past works. Here, the choreography performed by the computer-generated animal vaguely recalls the dances that go viral on apps like TikTok. Still, the dog is not entirely divorced from reality — it is set against a white background from which an oily substance drips down, forming an exact mirror of the painting seen on the work’s lefthand side by the video piece’s end.
Major collectors like Göess-Horten have historically shied away from hyper-conceptual works such as Timischl’s, but the opening show at her museum makes clear that she is willing to buy more experimental art.
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Brigitte Kowanz, Light Up, 2010
Image Credit: Alex Greenberger/ARTnews Brigitte Kowanz, who died earlier this year at age 64, may not be well known beyond Austria, but she is better known in the country, which picked her as its representative for the 2017 Venice Biennale. That Göess-Horten owns her work is a reminder that she has been supporting Kowanz long before others.
This light sculpture, which Göess-Horten acquired two years ago, features a red wood blob whose form vaguely rhymes with neon tubing bent into a similar shape. The lighting element appears to leap off the wall, distancing itself slightly from the wood piece beneath it. In doing so, the work makes light three dimensional and questions the relationship between painting and sculpture, a concern also taken up by a Dan Flavin work given its own gallery in the museum.
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Robert Rauschenberg, Crawfish Village Summer, 1987
Image Credit: Alex Greenberger/ARTnews As common as Robert Rauschenberg shows are, it is still rare to see works made by the artist after the ’60s in museum hangs. The Heidi Horten Collection’s curators have wisely offered up what could then be called a deep cut: a 1987 sculpture called Crawfish Village Summer.
Part of a series known as “Glut,” its name a reference to the surplus of oil during the 1980s, the sculpture is formed from found pieces of scrap metal, which Rauschenberg twisted so that corkscrew upward. In that way, like many other pieces by Rauschenberg, this one collapses the division between life and art, suggesting that materials for sculpture are readily available all around us. The work’s relationship to its title is left somewhat ambiguous, although it may just resemble a crustacean if you look quickly.