In around 1770, Franz Xaver Messerschmidt was one of the most eminent sculptors in Vienna, with several royal commissions under his belt. Shortly after, a series of professional snubs and the development of paranoid hallucinations led Messerschmidt to flee Vienna and end up in a house in Pressburg (now Bratislava). It was here that he began his ‘character heads’, a project to sculpt all 64 variations of the contortions of the human face in alabaster, which range from the grotesque to the bizarre and have been endlessly reinterpreted over the years – variously as satire, a product of madness, an effort at hyper-realism and a communion with the supernatural. The Belvedere’s exhibition aims to untangle some of these mysteries by situating the ‘character heads’ in the social and scientific milieu of the late 18th century (31 October–6 April 2026). As well as heads, the exhibition features some of his earlier royal commissions as well as works by contemporaneous artists, showing that, while Messerschmidt’s heads may be singularly strange and compelling, his preoccupation with depicting the human face was not uncommon for artists in his day.
Find out more from the Belvedere’s website.
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