Art in turn-of-century

Vienna

 Klimt - Egon Schiele

Replicas of Egon Schiele’s “Selfportrait with Chinese Lanterns. / Courtesy of Leopold Museum Vienna, Neue Galerie New York

Klimt, Schiele featured in new Seoul Arts Center exhibition

Gustav Klimt’s “Adele Bloch-Bauer I” will be on display at the Seoul Arts Center through March 10. / Courtesy of Leopold Museum Vienna, Neue Galerie New York

The 53 replicas in exhibit were created by TWIN, a specialist company which works actively with art institutions such as the Leopold Museum, which owns some critical works of Klimt and Schiele. According to its website, TWIN thrives to reproduce replicas in such a way that they appear ''absolutely identical’’ to the original by eye, and after touring the halls of the Seoul Arts Center, it’s hard to argue with the results.

The replicas, which were created in celebration of the 150th anniversary of Klimt's birth, have already traveled to galleries in Moscow, Beijing, Hanoi, Tokyo and Taipei before coming to Seoul.

"(A size of this exhibition) could never happen with the originals. The value for insurance alone would be somewhere between 750 million and 1 billion euros,’’ said Manfred Thumberger, art director of TWIN.

While the Klimt retrospective in 2009 already introduced Korean art-lovers to his renowned works such as "Judith I’’ and "Adam and Eva,’’ Golden Age Stories marks the first major exhibition showing Schiele’s works in a proper light.

Although they had been connected in life, the styles of Klimt and Schiele couldn’t be more different: Klimt’s works could be bluntly described as orderly and decorative. Schiele’s pieces are memorable for their explicitness that almost feels brutal.

As advanced as TWIN is in its technology, it did come up short of fully recreating the texture of old oil paintings. Still, the job on Klimt’s paintings using oil and gold leaf, such as “The Kiss” and "Adele Bloch-Bauer I,’’ was superb.

출처: 코리아 타임지