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Sacred Resonance Sound Archive # 1: The Pipe Organ in Flesh and Spirit. A Sacred Ecstasy
Amar Priganica´s Sound Archive explores the acoustic vibrations of the sacred – from organ drones and sound experiments to recordings in religious spaces. It gathers works where resonance becomes both a spiritual and corporeal experience. The pipe organ stands as a unique phenomenon in the history of music, uniting sound, religion, and technology in ways […]
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Wild Apollo’s Arrows: The Book
Decades before the French Revolution, the Enlightenment witnessed an outbreak of national-mythical and folkloristic enthusiasm whose force, as cultural philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder observed, resembled the epidemic arrows that open Homer’s Iliad. Alexander Roob’s image-text essay traces this attraction to a newly discovered “primitivist” Homer – from the cult surrounding his Nordic counterpart Ossian to […]
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Wild Apollo’s Arrows. An illustrated introduction I
I Classic / Anti-Classic Decades before the French Revolution, a culture of intoxicating affects burst into the heyday of the Enlightenment, increasingly boosted by national-mythical and folkloristic enthusiasm. The cultural philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder compared its impact to the epidemic projectiles that marked the beginning of Homer’s battle epic Iliad. Terms such as the ‘Age […]
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Wild Apollo’s Arrows. An illustrated introduction II
III Blind Visionaries –True Homers Paintings Gallery The dismantling of noble Homer had already begun in the 1730s, in the cultural-anthropological milieu of the Scottish Enlightenment, which was characterised by approaches based on early cognitive science and evolutionary theory. The atavistic portrait bust, which on a self-portrait of the Edinburgh barber and graphical chronicler John […]
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Wild Apollo’s Arrows. An illustrated introduction III
V Companionship of the Afterlife. Departure to the Past Exhibit Gallery The mesmerist influence on the Romantic generation was highlighted ideal-typically by several heads of a book of portraits that Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld, a main proponent of the Brotherhood of St Luke, created between 1816 and 1824 in Rome. Their gazes to the afterlife […]
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Beyond Elysium – On the print: Caspar Lavater, Felix Hess and Heinrich Fuessli at Spalding’s in Barth, Swedish Pomerania, in the Year 1763, after Heinrich Füssli, Berlin–Basel 1810
This large-format etching in the collection of the Melton Prior Institute, executed by E. S. Henne after a lost grisaille painting by Heinrich Füssli, documents a key event in the culture of Enlightenment friendship in the German-speaking world. Depicted is the visit of the three young Zurichers Johann Caspar Lavater, Felix Hess, and Heinrich Füssli […]
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New Acquisitions of the Linton Archive: William James Linton – The Lover’s Stratagem and Other Tales (1848)
The work, featuring over 100 wood-engraved illustrations by its author and editor, drifts like a phantom through Linton’s bibliography. This compilation, consisting predominantly of his own poetic texts, is not recorded in any library and was described by F. B. Smith – otherwise a highly reliable biographer of Linton – as a collection of works by […]
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Beyond Turner
Too beautiful! The English Gaze on the Rhine , Mittelrhein-Museum Koblenz, 10 May – 7 September 2025 After the end of the Continental Blockade, the Middle Rhine Valley became a major attraction for English travellers. The exhibition presents paintings, watercolours, prints, photographs, caricatures, and travel objects of this early form of tourism. Central to the popularisation […]
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Exhibition: Wild Apollo`s Arrows. Klopstock Cult & Ossian Fever / Die Pfeile des wilden Apollo. Klopstockkult & Ossianfieber
An exhibition of the Art Collections of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna in co-operation with the Exhibit Gallery, curated by Alexander Roob 7.3.–25.5.2025 Paintings Gallery of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Schillerplatz 3, 1st floor, 1010 Vienna Opening: 6.3.2025, 19–22 h Opening hours Daily except Monday: 10–18 h Song recital with lesson: Atelierhaus, […]
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The History of Press Graphics. 1819-1921.
Alexander Roob’s “History of Press Graphics. 1819-1921. The Age of Graphic Journalism” is out now. (Taschen Cologne, Hardcover, 24.6 x 37.2 cm). In over 600 pages, this far-reaching compendium presents press illustration and graphic journalism as a distinct and unique genre and a laboratory for developing avant-garde aesthetics. The images are largely taken from the […]