Focusing exclusively on a concise period of Alfred Kubin’s work between 1898 and 1906, the exhibition sheds new light on the artist’s most original and subversive body of work created in his early twenties in Munich, where he went to study art following a traumatic adolescence.
Alfred Kubin’s life was scarred by a series of tragedies: his mother, a gifted pianist, died when Kubin was only ten years old; his father married the mother’s sister immediately after, who then died in her first childbirth the same year. A pregnant woman, much his senior, seduced him soon after. At the age of 19, he attempted suicide on his mother’s grave and had a nervous breakdown following the death of his commander in the army in 1897. He was again brought to the brink of suicide in 1903 by his fiancée’s sudden death, hence his pervasive obsession with death and loss intertwined with love and sex.
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