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Body electricity. Erwin Autumn and Egon Schiele

Exhibition August 28, 2020 − February 14, 2021
Exhibition "Body electricity. Erwin Autumn and Egon Schiele"is a presentation based on a series of recently rediscovered drawings by Erwin Osen (1891–1970).

They were ordered by Stefan Jellinek (1871–1968), a physicist and physician who worked in Vienna until 1939, who during the First World War investigated the use of electricity to treat post-traumatic stress disorders. The objects of his trials were patients from the neurological department of Garrison Hospital II in Rennweg, headed by him.

Still unknown drawings created by Autumn, who was a companion and model of Egon Schiele (1890–1918), serve to expand and enrich our understanding of Viennese modernism and its artistic practice, which was closely connected with clinical medicine.

The exhibition places the work of the little-known but extremely mythologized artist Osen in the context of Jellinek's electro-pathological research and connects it with Schiele's interest in portraying patients.

Based on Osen’s unpublished work so far, the exhibition shows that supposedly well-known works can be viewed in a completely new light in the context of “clinical modernism”.