Edmund de Waal meets Albrecht Dürer

In 2012, the Kunsthistorisches Museum began a new series of exhibitions, for which acclaimed international artists are invited to present their own personal selections of objects from the museum’s collections. The first exhibition, The Ancients Stole All Our Great Ideas, was curated by the American artist Ed Ruscha. For the second exhibition in the series, the Kunsthistorisches Museum has invited the British artist and author Edmund de Waal.

Over the past three years, Edmund de Waal has made repeated visits to Vienna to view at first-hand a large number of objects both on display and in the museum’s storage rooms. The selection that he has made, gathered together under the title during the night, takes as its starting point the 1525 depiction of a nightmare by Albrecht Dürer, kept in a book belonging to the Kunstkammer. Other representations of dream, anxiety, disonance, disquiet and the moment of transition between waking and sleeping have been chosen from the Picture Gallery, the Kunstkammer, the collection of Greek and Roman Antiquities, the Library, the Collection of Historic Musical Instruments, the Imperial Treasury and the Kunstkammer at Schloss Ambras. Some will be familiar to visitors, and others less so. The exhibition will also include four objects from the Natural History Museum Vienna as well as a new work of art that Edmund de Waal has created especially for the exhibition in Vienna. The netsuke Hare with Amber Eyes, made famous by Edmund de Waal’s same-titled 2010 memoir, will also be on display.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a full programme of talks, musical perfomances and other events as well as by an exhibition catalogue and an artist edition produced for the Kunsthistorisches Museum by Edmund de Waal.