Gustav Klimt’s universe

Cata­lan Mod­ernism

On en­ter­ing, the vis­i­tor walks down a cor­ri­dor that acts as an in­tro­duc­tion to the ex­hi­bi­tion, and of Mod­ernism. The move­ment had com­mon el­e­ments around Eu­rope, as well as some na­tional par­tic­u­lar­i­ties. As the two cu­ra­tors of the ex­hi­bi­tion, the Cata­lan Imma Fondev­ila and the Aus­trian There­sia Nickl, point out, the ex­hi­bi­tion fo­cuses on two the­matic pil­lars: mod­ernism and fem­i­nism. We are told about the Vi­enna Se­ces­sion, of which Klimt was a pro­moter and mem­ber, but also about Cata­lan Mod­ernism, one of the most bril­liant pe­ri­ods in Cat­alo­nia’s artis­tic his­tory. In the same year that the Aus­trian move­ment was founded (1897), the Els Qua­tre Gats tav­ern opened, the lair of artists such as Casas, who were ready to cham­pion avant-garde art. Fondev­ila points out that the ex­hi­bi­tion high­lights “the hith­erto lit­tle-known re­la­tion­ships be­tween artists and ac­tivists in Vi­enna where Klimt lived and the Barcelona of that time.”

The ex­hi­bi­tion also high­lights the role of women in Klimt’s life. He once said: “I have no self-por­trait. I’m only in­ter­ested in other peo­ple, es­pe­cially women.“ Klimt was sur­rounded by women. Until his death in 1918, he lived with his mother and sis­ters. He never mar­ried but after his death there were 14 pa­ter­nity claims. Yet the woman with whom he had a par­tic­u­larly close re­la­tion­ship was Em­i­lie Flöge, a de­signer, busi­ness­woman and some­one who well rep­re­sents the model of woman strug­gling to achieve her in­de­pen­dence. Some argue that she and the artist are the fig­ures in his most fa­mous paint­ing, ’The Kiss’.

360º im­mer­sion

The cen­tre’s main room, with over 1,000 square me­tres of 360º screen, is the heart of the ex­hi­bi­tion. For 35 min­utes, the viewer is fully im­mersed in Klimt’s uni­verse. From all cor­ners of the room emerge the most iconic el­e­ments of his work, from his Byzan­tine-in­spired dec­o­ra­tions to ex­plo­sions of his favourite colour gold, which so heav­ily fea­tures in such paint­ings as ’The Kiss’. While music helps to over­whelm our senses, it’s worth sit­ting on one of the cubes in the room to ab­sorb the sen­sory over­load. The 360º screen, which cost about a mil­lion euros, is the work of Lay­ers of Re­al­ity com­pany, in col­lab­o­ra­tion with the Bel­gian stu­dio Ex­hi­bi­tion Hub. A num­ber of artists and cre­ative dig­i­tal arts stu­dios, both do­mes­tic and in­ter­na­tional, such as Dirty Mon­i­tor, Broomx, Ac­tiveMe, Jordi Massó and Ser­gio Al­biac, have also con­tributed to the pro­ject.

The cen­tre has also opened a new 300 square-metre room that ex­plores Klimt’s best-known work, ’The Kiss’, with a hang­ing sculp­ture of the work and three-di­men­sional map­ping. The ex­hi­bi­tion ends with a vir­tual re­al­ity room where the vis­i­tor can get a more per­sonal im­mer­sive ex­pe­ri­ence of the works of the Aus­trian artist. All in all, Ideal of­fers an in­tense way to ex­plore the uni­verse of an artist whose aes­thetic helped to trans­form the vi­sual arts of his time.