Curating Schloss Leopoldskron

The Venetian Salon, installed by Max Reinhardt in 1930 as his music room, is a striking representation of Reinhardt’s belief in the power of the theater. The ornate wall panels are inlaid with more than 1500 individual mirrors and a collection of paintings depicting the city of Venice and scenes from the Commedia dell’arte, an Italian Renaissance theatre form known for being free and open to the public, for creating political satire, for its inclusion of women actors, and for providing equal pay for all performers.

One essential characteristic of the Commedia dell’arte is the use of masks to transform the identity of the actors and enable them to explore different aspects of the human condition, a concept reflected in the Venetian Salon’s mirrors and depictions of masks symbolizing duality and multiple facets of identity. This symbolism inspired the 2024 project, “Masking the Venetian Salon”, where some images have been masked due to contestation, while others have been removed for restoration.

By masking the Venetian Salon, the project creates a dialogue between the room’s historical characteristics and its modern reinterpretations. Just as masks in Commedia dell’arte allow characters to transcend their original forms, this project seeks ro transform the identity of the room itself, offering the opportunity for new perspectives and critical interpretations, as well as new narratives to be reflected. Through this masking, the Venetian Salon evolves into a space that engages with the past while looking to the future.

The exhibition "Transformative Visions" in the Gallery of Schloss Leopoldskron, created in collaboration with KUD Manifest and ART CIRCLE International Arts Festival, showcases the works of five international artists: Simone Kessler (GER; title image), Maša Gala (SLO), Lalo Sanchez Del Valle (MEX), Ilse Van Roy (BEL), and Saburi Norihiko (JPN). Each artist brings a unique global perspective, woven together under the overarching theme of transformation. Reflected in this exhibition and at the core of Salzburg Global's values and mission, is a belief in change as a positive and necessary force for the betterment of society.  

Art has always been a reflection of change—whether through the dramatic shifts in style from the Renaissance to the modern era or through the evolution of materials and techniques. This exhibition highlights how contemporary artists continue this tradition, using their work to comment on, react to, and influence the changing world around them.  

Currently showcased in Schloss Leopoldskron's Seminar Room Lounge, the work series "The Great Below" by Sebastian Herzau puts the viewer immediately in the role of a voyeur. Due to the eye contact, through an apparently transparent veil, an intimacy is created between the viewer and the only dimly recognizable motifs, which is intended by the artist and pushes the boundaries of the mysterious. Sebastian Herzau's portraits show a process that goes hand in hand with finding oneself, but at the same time with a certain astonishment. 

The sounding out of distance and yet immediate proximity becomes a comprehensible creative process for the viewer. The process of perception suggested by Sebastian Herzau does not provide an exact image of an environment, but rather a model that is formed from the subjectivity of the individual. He reflects reality with reduced means, giving space to illusions and provoking in the viewer fantasies and play with experience. In his painting Sebastian Herzau changes reality in the best sense to an aesthetic appearance.

Since 1947, over 40,000 diverse individuals worldwide have become Salzburg Global Fellows.

Richard Schabetsberger’s timeless portraits capture their unique stories, building a lasting visual legacy that reflects the Fellowship’s international spirit.

The portraits, most set against a gray backdrop, focus on the individuals, providing a space for emotional expression and psychological depth. This series not only preserves these personal stories but also aligns with the ongoing mission of Salzburg Global to challenge current and future leaders to shape a better world.

The exhibition will be regularly updated with as years pass and more individuals are welcomed to Schloss Leopoldskron and become Fellows.

TreeTime is a short, poetic conversation with a nearby tree asking you to reflect on your relationship with nature and the people around you. Through curiosity and conversation, visitors will reflect on the future we share with all living things, build empathy with nature, and move towards collective action. It is an artistic project created by a Salzburg Global Seminar Fellow, Amanda Lovelee, and her collaborator Emily Stover (collectivelly, they form the civic design studio Plus/And) during a residency in 2022.

Currently, TreeTime is installed at the Schloss Leopoldskron grounds where you can engage with the project through an artist designed book made available to hotel guest and Fellows, "A Visitors Guide to TreeTime"; by finding small bronze plaques around the Schloss park; or with a Map that marks where each "interactive" tree is located. This project will gather responses and use the data collected to depict a future we want to share.

The exhibition of works created by Salzburg Global Fellows is part of an ongoing curation project aimed at ensuring that the richness and diversity of Salzburg Global's programs and Fellows are manifested at Schloss Leopoldskron. Salzburg Global Seminar is particularly committed to improving the visual representation of its mission as well as the values of its programs.

The current exhibition, which opened in June 2022, includes works by Louisa Whettam, a descendant of the Wiradjuri tribe in New South Wales, Australia; Siphiwe Ngwenya, a painter, illustrator, conceptualist, and self-taught social scientist from South Africa; and Phillip Simpson, a painter and mural artist from Detroit, USA.

Opened in June 2022 and currently on display throughout the Schloss and Meierhof, "Cultivating History, Documenting Dreams" features photographs taken by Salzburg Global Fellows during the October 2019 Cultural Innovators Forum by Jose Cotto, a photographer and designer from New Orleans, and Yasmine Omari, a Palestinian-American photographer and cinematographer born in Haifa.

Both Yasemine and Jose are members of the Salzburg Global Cultural Innovators Forum and returned to Salzburg to complete an artist residency during the program's 2019 annual meeting. 

At the invitation of the Salzburg Museum to travel to up-state New York on the occasion of an exhibition marking 100 years of the Salzburg Festival, photographer Andrew Phelps spent a week in 2019 in the town of Hastings on Hudson documenting the final resting place of Max Reinhardt.

In a very unpretentious corner of the Westchester Hills Cemetery he found the mausoleum where Max Reinhardt was interred. A surprising discovery was its Tiffany stained glass window, which clearly shows the view from Leopoldskron to the Untersberg Mountain. Phelps juxtaposed this view with an image of the palace's back terrace.

Inspired to look further for elements of Reinhardt's story, Phelps also photographed at the remains of Reinhardt's garden theater in the park of Schloss Leopoldskron: "To give my image, which is only a shadow of what the place once was some depth and power, I researched the remaining images which exist of the original site, called the image up on my iPad and photographed is as an artifact laying on top of a table upon which Reinhardt once worked. It is this layering of images, transcending time and physical space, that interests me in this small suite of images."

2018 marked the 100th anniversary of Max Reinhardt's purchase of Schloss Leopoldskron.

To mark this anniversary, Salzburg Global Seminar curated an exhibition of unique photographs collected over many years, showing the life of Max Reinhardt over seven decades: as a young actor in Vienna and a celebrated theater director in Berlin, as a bon vivant in Venice and a director in Hollywood, as a skier in Switzerland, a tourist in London, and a passenger on an Atlantic steamer on his way to emigration. 

The photographs can be seen as a permanent exhibition in the Meierhof. 

'Here You Can Be Whatever You Want: a Celebration of Afropunk' was exhibited in our Great Hall and in the Meierhof Café. Curated by Salzburg Global Fellow Karah Shaffer, it was a collection of documentary portraits and atmospheric images made at Afropunk festivals on three continents and in four countries between 2014 and 2018, celebrating Black festival attendees fully embodying individual expression through community, music, dance, and fashion. The tenets of Afropunk are  “no sexism, no racism, no ableism, no homophobia, no ageism, no fatphobia, no transphobia, and no hatefulness”.

Photographers Kholood Eid and Melissa ‘Bunni’ Elian documented festival guests of all genders and walks of life in spaces unmarried to the weight of the societal and political landscapes immediately outside festival grounds.

‘Here You Can Be Whatever You Want’ welcomed Salzburg Global Fellows and Schloss Leopoldskron´s guests in the Great Hall, surrounding them with images of people of all walks of life that celebrate unadulterated expression and joyful individuality. The show set the tone for what Fellows and guests alike can expect while within the storied walls of the Schloss, ensuring every visitor that here they are afforded the freedom to be themselves. Here, they can be whoever they want.

A collection of photographs from Detroit and Dortmund by photographers Theon Delgado Sr. and Peyman Azhari currently in exhibition in our Gallery, "Visualizing Translation: Homeland and Heimat in Detroit and Dortmund", reveals how vibrant multilingual communities in Southwest Detroit and Northern Dortmund lay claim to and shape their neighboorhood for the better.

On the surface, both cities have several obvious points of comparison: a postindustrial landcape, historically driven by a limited number of industries and high levels of per-capita debt. In a series of interviews, made available to listen online accessible via QR codes for some of the photos, residents also reflect on the terms homeland and Heimat. These terms express modes of belonging that all too often depend on keeping Black, Indigenous and People of Color out.

The hope is that the images presented can help all to see Detroit and Dortmund – but also ourselves and our own communities – from a new perspective.

This exhibition was co-curated by Salzburg Global Fellow Karah Shaffer (Facing Change: Documenting America), Alan Chin and Kristin Dickinson (University of Michigan), and supported by the Mellon Sawyer Seminar.

Paintings by Andrea Bischof from her series “Into Color” were exhibited in the Gallery Lounge of Schloss Leopoldskron during the summer of 2023. Described as a “coloristic feast for the eyes”, the paintings showcase her talent in the use of different tones and intensity of pigments, creating, at the same time, movement and refinement.

One of Austria's most important contemporary artists, Bischof, in her own words, believes that “each painting carries different dimensions of time. It has a piece from the past, from the present and from the future.” This also applies to her actual creative process in abstract painting: “The present is what I see in the moment, my active doing. The past flows into my painting process through the many impressions, experiences, memories, conscious and unconscious.”

In late 2022, the contemporary visual art project “Children in War“, initiated in May 2016, was presented in the Gallery.

Showing portraits of Ukrainian children and regions most affected by the Russian aggression from 2014 until today, the project aims at drawing attention to issues Ukrainian children residing in the line of fire are facing because of the ongoing war against Ukraine.

Previously, the exhibition was shown at the NATO headquarters in Brussels, Belgium.

Trevor D. Traina's impressive photo collection, which has grown over many years and is being shown for the first time in Salzburg in a small selection, gives us exciting insights into the extraordinary history of U.S. photography through vintage prints, more modern prints and special photo editions.

Represented are great classics such as Ansel Adams (1902-1984) with the majestic landscapes of Yosemite National Park, Diane Arbus (1923-1971) with her touching frontal portraits with which she wrote photographic history, and works by Robert Frank (1924-2019), William Eggleston and Steven Shore. The exhibition offers an impressive overview of the photographic art of America over the past seventy years, while demonstrating the vitality of America today.

Before part of the exhibition came to Leopoldskron in the summer of 2022, the entire collection was on view at the Albertina in Vienna in 2021.

The German-born artist Friedrich Danielis was so fascinated by Schloss Leopoldskron as a young person that he climbed over the walls in 1960/61, forbidden to do so, to photograph the statues in the park. The exhibition "Passing Through" showed the last surviving original prints by the artist, who died in 2021 shortly before the opening.  

"At the pond of Leopoldskron was once, is, and could still be an abandoned park, enclosed by a wall, and a rural baroque little castle, put here by a theater man because he found the dominating silhouette of the fortress too warlike and the sight of the mountains oppressive, if not a mild, inviting roof, promising among dark trees and sheltered by the garden wall, as a counterbalance to alleviate the harsh one-sidedness of nature and the impression of violence and mean domination that the fortress presented. " - Friedrich Danielis

As a former press photographer of the Salzburg Festival, the "master of the Leica" Oskar Anrather has countless pictures in his repertoire. But what embodies the Festival more than Hugo von Hofmannsthal's infamous Jedermann? The story is timeless and the performers numerous. After 700 performances and 100 years on stage, it is linked to the Salzburg Festival like no other play.

A selection of the best pictures was on display in the summer of 2021 in his exhibition "Das Spiel vom Sterben des Reichen Mannes" in the Red Salon of Schloss Leopoldskron. The time span of the selected pictures represents over thirty years, from 1965 to 1998. Oskar Anrather's photographs are outstanding. During rehearsals and performances he photographed inconspicuously and discreetly. With his Leica, he captured the characters of the performers with their different facets. The photographs touch, impress, inspire wonder and reflect his great talent as a photographer. One remembers the top-class casts and some reminisce while looking at them. With the help of his grandson Christoph Anrather, an exhibition has been created that is a wonderful tribute to the photographer who passed away in 2016. Christoph Anrather rummaged through various archives for a long time and collected countless photos.

The exhibition has come about in cooperation with the Leica Galerie Salzburg. 

During a Salzburg Global Seminar program in October 2018, several posters were placed in the Venetian Salon of Schloss Leopoldskron protesting the commedia dell'arte paintings on the walls, indicating that they are depictions of blackface and racial prejudice.

Following this "Venetian Salon Protest," Salzburg Global Seminar conducted a comprehensive review of the artworks and other elements of Schloss Leopoldskron's cultural history and heritage, with the goal of ensuring that anyone visiting Salzburg Global Seminar's facilities, whether Fellows or hotel guests, both now and in the future, receive information about the complex history of the building and the difficult and sometimes controversial historical and cultural layers that belong to the site. 

Throughout its history, Schloss Leopoldskron has been inextricably linked to cycles of power, persecution and renewal. Despite difficult and sometimes controversial legacies, as well as dark periods in Leopoldskron's history, cycles of renewal - through vision, entrepreneurship, and cultural and social leadership - have created a space of creativity, inclusion, and inspiration for people from around the world.

In 2015, Lithuanian artist Ray Bartkus unveiled his installation "Hybrid War" at Schloss Leopoldskron, creating a different kind of reflection by using the calm surface of the lake and the natural backdrop of the surrounding park, mountains and picturesque rococo palace. Over the course of four days, additional elements of military equipment (a periscope, artillery cannons, the turret of a tank, and an anti-missile launcher) emerged from the water each day. In this way, "Hybrid War" is literally a reflection on modern warfare, characterized by a high degree of uncertainty, moments of surprise, symmetry and asymmetry.

"These weapons are here to enable self-defense and secure the territorial integrity of the lake's inhabitants - a goose and three ducks. We artists have nothing to do with it and reject all accusations of being involved in this so-called art installation," Bartkus explained.

In the summer of 2014, two monumental bronze sculptures by Mondsee artist Helga Vockenhuber stood in the garden of Schloss Leopoldskron. The two sculptures "LA NUEVA EVA" and "IL NUOVO ADAMO", created in 2012 and almost three meters high, show harmonious faces, characterized by a mysterious presence.

The rapt faces radiate a forgotten grace: In Adam, apart from the gaze, all the senses seem open, awake and alert. The striking lines of the face, which are nevertheless harmonious, even convey the feeling of elegance and strength, which therefore spread out in such an expansive form.

Eva impresses with her large, protruding lips, which express an unlimited tenderness and long strands of hair, which reach the chest and surround the head and face like a royal veil. With this figure, Helga Vockenhuber wants to bring together the characteristics of the female faces of all ethnic groups, to close a circle around this constant wheel, the adventure of life.

"The expansion of the volumes makes them appear powerful, and the modeling exposes every detail, no matter how small." the artist describes her work.