The hanging gardens of Salzburg
11/16/21 Recently demolished, already a place of longing … What do the Rauchmühle and the Café Winkler in Salzburg have in common with the Baal temple in Palmyra in Syria? They no longer exist – and were painted by Ellen Harvey. The MdM Mönchsberg shows the fascinating show The disappointed tourist.
By Heidemarie KlabachHer
Who doesn’t like to visit what he or she already knows and has fondly remembered? What if there is suddenly nothing but a heap of rubble or a hole in the ground? “Is there a place that you – would like to visit again, but that no longer exists?” This is what the artist Ellen Harvey asks people all over the world. And then she paints the places mentioned with oil and acrylic paint on wooden panels. The disappointed tourist is called Ellen Harvey’s first solo exhibition in Austria. And this is the name of the series of sights, districts or natural monuments that have disappeared – destroyed or “risen” in urban development – since 2019.
The work can also be seen in Salzburg Old Cafe WinklerWhose place is the Museum der Moderne on the Mönchsberg: Such a meeting WILL not be so easy in the world again. Also die Smoke mill, about which there has been a lot of discussion in Salzburg and where there is now a new housing estate (without a cultural center) can be seen again in its original form.
Another reference to Salzburg: The artist was also inspired for her series by Hubert Sattler’s cosmoramas in the Panorama Museum. Sattler painted his 130 paintings of famous sights (which surrounded the large round picture of Salzburg at his traveling exhibitions and still surrounds it today in changing presentations) especially for those of his contemporaries who could not travel to Italy, Egypt or anywhere else.
“In contrast, the artist creates” Ellen Harvey since 2019 paintings of places that have been destroyed and can therefore no longer be visited, ”explains Tina Teufel, the curator of the exhibition. “In times of limited travel opportunities, this show offers a current critical examination of the human longing for the other, the exotic and the beautiful.” Ellen Harvey is about “the love of people for special places, for nature and the past, without losing sight of the very specific ecological and social consequences of this longing”. As part of the exhibition on the Mönchsberg, the artist and the museum invited the public to suggest other places to be painted via the website www.disappointedtourist.org.
At the beginning of November the artist had a studio in the MdM and painted in this open studio in the exhibition. The temple of Baal in Palmyra in Syria was only destroyed in the war a few years ago, and the old synagogue on Michelsberg in Wiesbaden was destroyed by the Nazis in 1938. Harvey also paints landscapes threatened by climate change, such as the Great Barrier Reef off Australia or “places that are being lost through technological change or gentrification”. These include, for example, the Edmonton Green district in north London. Particularly important to the artist is the “equal treatment of culturally significant places and deeply personal favorite places, of the most recent disappearances and the great losses of history”, according to the MdM. Currently the cycle includes The disappointed tourist 243 plates.
Ellen Harvey, born in Farnborough, Great Britain, in 1967, lives and works in New York. She is a graduate of Harvard College and Yale Law School, studied at the Berlin University of the Arts and has received numerous awards, most recently a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship. Ellen Harvey created large-format works of art for public spaces in the USA, for example for the Miami Beach Convention Center, for airports in San Francisco or Philadelphia or for regional train and subway stations, such as the Yankee Stadium and Queens Plaza stations in New York City.