Constructing Paradise

The rapid industrialization and urbanization in the late 19th century led society to yearn for a sense of newness and otherness in the face of the newly modernized world. As artists such as Paul Gauguin became entranced by faraway places, a new category of imagery illustrating a previously unseen and “undiscovered” part of the world began to pervade the Western canon. The idea of a “wild, untouched exotic” emerged as a product of colonialism, as many of the same justifi cations for colonial rule also fueled Western curiosity of these foreign lands, making way for a new colonial narrative: creating desire-worlds that existed to fulfi ll Western dreams. Constructing Paradise exhibits contemporary reinterpretations of notions of the “exotic” by artists based in Austria or the United States. Taking iconic works such as Paul Gauguin’s Noa Noa and Oskar Kokoschka’s Tiger Cat as starting points, curator Dieter Buchhart assembles a diverse range of work from early contemporary to more recent artistic responses to the modernist imprint of desire and fantasy on contemporary culture to show the psychological impacts of the modernist image on image culture and the Western psyche.