Marcin Maciejowski

Having been invited by Thomas Trummer, curator of the Österreichische Galerie Belvedere, to be an artist in residence at the Atelier Augarten for the summer of 2006, the Polish painter Marcin Maciejowski could hardly help responding to the Belvedere’s large Gustav Klimt collection and the countless works by Egon Schiele in Vienna. Maciejowski studied these local fin-de-siècle heroes, painted as if obsessed for nights on end, and then cavalierly populated the Augarten’s international group show “after Schiele” with his own works; he also mounted a solo show at the Galerie Meyer Kainer. The residency further afforded him a front-row seat from which to witness the scandal that unfolded around the restitution of Gustav Klimt’s Adele Bloch-Bauer I, 1907, part of the Belvedere’s collection, to the American descendants of the painting’s original owner, who was forced to flee from the Nazis. The

— Brigitte Huck