Of killers, friends, soulmates: Lentos celebrates “siblings”

A topic that has hitherto been of surprisingly little concern to the art world is finally being given attention at Lentos in Linz on its 20th birthday: the siblings. The “Sisters & Brothers” exhibition, which runs until September 17, shows 120 works showing how the view of siblings has revolutionized over the past 500 years. “Art reflects how society has changed,” says Nicole Fritz. The director of the Kunsthalle Tübingen designed the exhibition, which was previously on view in her own building. “In the beginning, siblings were seen in a bourgeois order, now the sibling relationship is experienced as changeable. The focus is on the individual.”

The exhibition takes a chronological tour of art history. At the beginning, the focus was particularly on mythological siblings, as the copper engraving “Cain and Abel” from 1589 shows. In it, Jan H. Muller takes up the most terrible aspect of siblings, fratricide. While the aspect of the family order was in the foreground in the Baroque period, a “cult of friendship” developed in the Romantic era, as Fritz says: “Suddenly, siblings were portrayed as soul mates and friends.” For example, in 1867 Karl Böhm staged the “caring sister” who lovingly feeds her little siblings.

As science discovered childhood, the image of art changed, as did later when artists also reflected on their own relationships with siblings. In 1980, Miriam Cahn worked on the suicide of her “silent sister” in eight drawings, some of which were thrown out angrily.

Elisabeth Nowak-Thaller, vice-director of Lentos, has added works from the collection to the show. The result is a journey through the centuries worth seeing, which illuminates the many facets of the relationship between brothers and sisters in many different ways.

The exhibition “Sisters & Brothers – 500 years of siblings in art” can be seen at Lentos until September 17th. lentos.at