GRAND TOUR: Matts Leiderstam

This week White Line Hotels welcomed the Schlossberghotel in Graz to its family of individualistic hotels. Boasting a collection of over 400 original artworks in every room of the hotel as well as public areas, Schlossberghotel is “the art hotel.” Should your visit to Graz be in the autumn, take a short stroll over to the Grazer Kunstverein to see artist Matts Leiderstam’s Grand Tour.

Starting some 300 years ago, young Englishmen of means made their “Grand Tour” through the European Continent. With nearly unlimited time and funds, they travelled a fairly standardized itinerary to learn about the roots of western culture, perfect their language skills, hobnob with the elite, and commission paintings. While making obvious connections to the era of the “Grand Tour,” Leiderstam invites his viewers on a different sort of tour, one in which the standardizations of content and display of artworks are sometimes quite literally put under the magnifying glass. Leiderstam thrives on producing a constant productive confusion in the canonical order of art. Using methods borrowed from the art historian’s, he draws his viewer to the repressed power, political and sexual subtexts of art. After taking Leiderstam’s Grand Tour, will you look at art the same way?

September 25 – November 11, 2010 at Grazer Kunstverein, Palais Trauttmansdorff, Burggasse 4, 8010 Graz, Austria. Monday until friday 10.30am until 6pm. Saturday 10.30am until 4.30pm.

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Categories: Graz, Art

Contributing writer: Melissa Frost