Albrecht Dürer’s Dream Vision (1525), a drawing of the artist’s apocalyptic dream about a great deluge, is the inspiration for the exhibition During the Night: Edmund de Waal Meets Albrecht Dürer (until 29 January 2017) at the Kunsthistorisches Museum. When the British artist was invited to organise a show of works from the museum, he did not want to create a "Fodor's tour" of the museum’s holdings because he dislikes “the odour of masterpieces”, De Waal explains in the exhibition catalogue. Dream Vision was his “compass” on which to construct a show based on the themes of dreams, anxiety and dissonance. Among the works on display are a 17th-century devil statuette in a glass prism, 17th-century ivory memento mori heads and Lucas Cranach the Younger’s painting Allegory of Virtue (1548). These are joined by a new work by De Waal, which consists of a vitrine full of pieces of broken porcelain, aluminium boxes and lead.
Rarely is the contrast between old and new as striking as it is at Vienna’s Secession. The gold-domed, architectural embodiment of the turn-of-the-century art movement is now home to some of the city’s most cutting-edge shows. The institution’s exhibitions on Francis Alÿs and Avery Singer (until 22 January 2017), which both opened this week, are no exception. Alÿs, who was born in Belgium and is based in Mexico, presents his series Le temps du sommeil, a cycle of 111 dream-like paintings which he started 20 years ago. Singer, meanwhile, a young US artist who has had a stratospheric start to her career (she recently had a solo show at the Stedelijk Museum), presents a new series of paintings created using a computer-controlled industrial airbrush printer.
Ai Weiwei: Translocation, Transformation at the 21er Haus (until 20 November) is the Chinese artist’s first major exhibition in Austria. The show includes the first presentation outside of China of Ai’s Wang Family Ancestral Hall installation. The work, made from 1,300 individual pieces and measuring 14 metres in height, is an old wooden temple that once belonged to the Wang family. The tea merchants were expelled from the province of Jiangxi during China’s Cultural Revolution and the structure was left to rot until Ai bought it. The work mimics the travels of the 21er Haus’s own building, which was brought back from Brussels after being used as the Austrian pavilion at the World’s Fair in 1958. The exhibition has been so popular that the museum has had to extend its opening hours.