Most museums in Vienna close at 18:00 except on Thursday or Friday when some are open until 21:00. As it was a Saturday I decided to visit the Anton Corbijn exhibition at the Kunstforum Wien, which is open until 19:00. I’m glad I did, because more than half of the works on show were unfamiliar to me. It had somehow escaped me that in the early 1980s Corbijn made a series of photographs of sculptures found in cemeteries in France, Austria and Italy. In the past I, too, have found myself drawn to cemeteries such as Père Lachaise in Paris and the Certosa di Bologna in Bologna, one of the oldest monumental cemeteries in Europe. But whereas I was drawn to the architecture and the atmosphere, Corbijn focused on the facial expressions of the sculptures.
Since this is the first Anton Corbijn retrospective in Austria the exhibition also includes some of Corbijn’s iconic portraits of Miles Davis, Joy Division, David Bowie dressed as The Elephant Man and John Martyn dressed as a hobbit. Somehow Corbijn always manages to bring out a person’s psychological complexities. He photographs the famously publicity shy Gerhard Richter from behind, he shows Jody Foster pensively sitting in a chair and he photographs Philip Seymour Hoffman standing behind a sign post with both “One Way” signs pointing in the same direction.
The rooms with portraits of female artists and rockstars also contains various photographs that I hadn’t seen before as does the room dedicated to the work Corbijn has created over the decades for Depeche Mode. Another room shows a selection of music videos that Anton Corbijn has directed for the likes of Joy Division, U2, Depeche Mode and Arcade Fire. The music can be heard in the other rooms as well. It draws you in and adds to the lively atmosphere.
Favourite Darkness is a great exhibition, I just wish it had been larger, but of course then I wouldn’t have been able to see everything in little more than an hour.
The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue that you can buy from your favourite bookstore.
Anton Corbijn: Favourite Darkness is at the Kunstforum Wien until 29 June 2025.
Links
Anton Corbijn at the Gemeentemuseum and the Fotomuseum Den Haag.