FASCINATION PAPER. Albertina Director General Ralph Gleis on the astonishing diversity of a fragile medium

With Fascination Paper, the Albertina turns its gaze inward — into a collection of more than one million works on and of paper — and outward, toward a renewed understanding of what paper can be. In this exhibition film, Director General Ralph Gleis recounts how curiosity became a curatorial principle, and how asking simple questions opened unexpected paths through centuries of artistic production.

When Gleis arrived at the Albertina, he began by asking each curator a deceptively modest question: what is the strangest, smallest, largest, or most surprising object in your collection? The answers revealed a hidden wealth that demanded to be shared. What followed was not a conventional survey, but an exhibition born from discovery — one that moves freely across epochs, genres, and scales, tracing paper’s astonishing versatility as both image carrier and artistic material.

A tiny, enigmatic object from the 15th century — a paper heart marked by a cut — becomes emblematic of the exhibition’s logic. Its unexpected resonance with a modern gesture leads to new searches, new pairings, and new dialogues within the collection. Again and again, works from distant centuries seem to speak to one another, revealing how experimentation with paper has long anticipated ideas we often associate with modern and contemporary art.

Installed as an open parcours, the exhibition invites visitors to shift their own perspectives. One ascends stairs to overlook an 18th-century city map, lies down to gaze at Anselm Kiefer’s paper sky, or encounters objects whose scale challenges the architecture itself — including a 26-meter-long Japanese leporello that required an entirely new spatial solution. Small and monumental, fragile and structural, intimate and immersive: paper unfolds here in all its contradictions.

Perhaps most surprising is the invitation to touch. Through carefully produced facsimiles, paper becomes tangible again — to be handled, unfolded, played with, just as it once was. This rare activation transforms the museum visit into a physical experience, reminding us that paper was never meant only to be looked at, but also to be used.

As part of the Albertina’s 250th anniversary, Fascination Paper looks both backward and forward. Alongside canonical works by Dürer and masterful Japanese woodcuts stand contemporary acquisitions, signaling an ongoing commitment to collecting and rethinking paper as a living medium. In Gleis’ reflection, the exhibition becomes more than a celebration of the past — it is a promise to the future.

https://www.albertina.at

Interviewee: Ralph Gleis

Copyright info: The audio and video recording has been made with personal permission of the artist.
Licensing: 0
Language(s): German, English
Subtitles: German, English
Producer: KA21 GmbH / CastYourArt
Production crew: Wolfgang Haas, Helmut Feier, Melvin Urregg, Michael Rottmann
Production country: Austria, Vienna