Digitorial for the exhibition Helene Schjerfbeck
Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt
Römerberg
D-60311 Frankfurt
Germany
www.schirn.de
Digitorial
Online magazine: www.schirn-mag.com
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As part of the exhibition Helene Schjerfbeck the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt presents a completely new digital education format, the digitorial. Relying on an innovative form of storytelling, enlightening backgrounds, art-historical and historico-cultural contexts, as well as crucial exhibition contents are now easily accessible to all visitors interested in preparing their tour through the museum on a responsive website. Free of charge, the digital format in English and German allows the public to get into the right mood for the issues of the exhibition before visiting it. In order to make this familiarization possible, the digitorial presents instructive particulars, comprehensive relationships, and background stories combined in a novel visual way on the website. The multi-media linkage of image, sound, and text ensures a multiple interweaving of contents and permits entirely new forms of representing, describing and communicating art—whether at home, in a café, or on the way to the exhibition.
“Until now, many visitors were only able to enjoy an exhibition in all its facets or experience artworks in their various contexts after they had read the catalogue or participated in a tour through the show. It is our concern to provide a mode of preparation based on digital technologies, which is both accessible everywhere and easily taken in. The digitorial can be retrieved free of charge by all people interested in it; we will also use the offer directly in the communication with our future visitors: just imagine that you are booking an online ticket for your planned visit and are sent the digitorial as a link. You may use your time on the train to the exhibition, for example, to make yourself familiar with the essentials of the exhibition’s contents presented to you in an intelligent way. As the scope of your knowledge will be different when you arrive at your destination, your experience of the exhibits will be more complex, profound, enjoyable, and richer,” emphasizes Max Hollein, Director of the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt in regard to the concept behind the new digital education offer.
The digitorial was initially conceived for the exhibition Helene Schjerfbeck on show at the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt from 2 October 2014 to 11 January 2015, and is responsive to desktop, tablet and smartphone display. Sharing functions invite the user to communicate the contents in the social networks and embed them there. Everyone buying an online ticket is sent the link to the website. The digitorial presents itself as an introduction into the daring pictorial world of one of the most important women artists of Finnish Modernism and comprises in-depth, compactly edited contents and context information on various levels. Highly acclaimed and celebrated as a national icon in Finland, Helene Schjerfbeck created an extensive, impressive work pivoted on the human figure in her career that spans more than 60 years. This is why the digitorial starts with a number of central self-portraits by the artist, which, visually overlapping, outline the painter’s development from a realistic artist to one taking a modern, avant-garde approach. Schjerfbeck’s oeuvre is not least characterized by the repetition of certain motifs and the use of visual source material such as paintings by old masters. Drawing on various examples and details, the digitorial examines this aspect in a surprisingly different way and thus unfolds relevant art-historical analogies the user is invited to explore. Discovering the artist’s principles of composition, the subjects of her works, and her language of forms and colors, the user will also come upon unexpected aspects like Helene Schjerfbeck’s interest in the fashion of her time. A picture gallery in the digitorial confronts the artist’s outstanding portraits of women with illustrations from French fashion magazines that inspired her. The digitorial also shows how these portraits have influenced today’s Scandinavian fashion scene several decades later. Future visitors will also receive a concrete hot tip for their tour through the exhibition besides this and further telling background information. This kind of preparation will turn their stay into a both knowledge-based and enjoyable aesthetic experience.
Technical requirements: The digitorial has been optimized for the operating systems iOS 7+ and Android 4+ (for Chrome) and the browsers Internet Explorer (version 10+), Safari (version 6+), Chrome (version 37), and Firefox (version 31).
Director: Max Hollein
Press contact: Axel Braun (Head of Press/Public Relations):
T (+49 69) 29 98 82 153 / F (+49 69) 29 98 82 240 / presse [at] schirn.de / www.schirn.de (texts, images, and films for download under PRESS)
