Chagall

The central themes of motherhood and birth, death, and love predominate in Chagall’s paintings, which reflect upon and illuminate them from new perspectives in their repetition and variation. Recurring motifs such as the rooster and the donkey, the cow and the fish function within the artist’s variable, fantastical cosmos as elements that are flexible in terms of their respective meanings. The seeming contradictions and contrasts in Chagall’s compositions and visual worlds bear visible witness to the artist’s search for a “logic of the illogical”, via which he added a psychological dimension to traditional pictorial forms.

This presentation at the ALBERTINA Museum, encompassing around 90 works selected from all of the artist’s creative periods, concentrates on his lively engagement with life’s most primal and universal themes—thereby revealing a diverse multitude of “impossible possibilities.”

The exhibition is a collaboration between the ALBERTINA Museum, Vienna, and the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf.