Angewandte Wien

My School of Seeing (1953), Oskar Kokoschka’s founding text for the Summer Academy, emphasises the inspiration of artistic creation through seeing. This philosophy opened the academy to approaches that stood in stark contrast to the academism of painting at the time.

What seeing means has changed through social criticism of visual perception and current digital developments. In its artistic expression, a “New School of Seeing” tries to free itself from current art tendencies and find methods that reflect a theory and practice of seeing today.

For this exhibition, students of the Department of Painting and Animated Film, directed by Prof. Judith Eisler, at the University of Applied Arts Vienna dealt with Kokoschka's “School of Seeing” as well as with influential texts by John Berger (Ways of Seeing, 1972) and Rudolf Arnheim (Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye, 1974 / 1954). Both authors shaped an expanded cultural interpretation of seeing and, thus, a new understanding of art and aesthetics.