The Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna places 120 works by Peter Paul Rubens at the center of a major exhibition.

Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) was a superstar even during his lifetime. He is still considered to be the most important Flemish painter of the Baroque period. The Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna has 40 paintings of the master and his workshop. These include intensely colorful main works filled with figures, such as the giant altar paintings for the Jesuit church in Antwerp, as well as more intimate depictions, such as the "The Fur" (an illustration of Ruben's second wife Hélène Fourment), the "Head of Medusa" or Rubens' late self-portrait.

For the exhibition "Peter Paul Rubens: The Power of Transformation", numerous international loan works (including from the Prado in Madrid and the Hermitage in St. Petersburg) were obtained, enabling more than 120 works by Rubens to be seen: Drawings, oil sketches, panel paintings and large canvases. The content focuses on the painter's creativity. Rubens understood like nobody else how to use the works of other people for his own creations. The dialog with artworks of his famous predecessors and contemporaries engaged Rubens throughout his lifetime and left its mark on his 50 years of work. The show will therefore also present sculptures from the ancient world and the Renaissance, as well as works by Titian and Caravaggio, which Rubens took as examples from which to develop his idiosyncratic and radically new visual formulas.

Peter Paul Rubens: The Power of Transformation. 17 October 2017 - 21 January 2018
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