The internationally acclaimed Austrian sculptor Fritz Wotruba (1907 - 1975) would have celebrated his hundredth birthday in 2007. On this occasion, the Kunsthaus Zug is paying homage to the artist by presenting a major interdisciplinary exhibition with works from its own holdings as well as numerous loans from the Wotruba-Verein (Wotruba Association) in Vienna. The show is intended to convey a broad overview of the oeuvre while also acquainting visitors with this impressive and multifaceted artist-personality. Close connections to literature and music will be drawn.

During World War II, through the agency of Philipp Etter – Executive Federal Councillor of Zug at the time – Wotruba lived in exile in Zug with his Jewish wife Marian. Here he received numerous artists and collectors as his guests and was able to continue his artistic work and exhibit. Among the friends he and his wife Marian found in Zug were Mr. and Mrs. Kamm. Wotruba kept up his close contact with the town until the end of his life. Home to the most comprehensive collection of Wotruba works in public possession as well as the Wotruba Archive, the Kunsthaus Zug serves as an important centre for Wotruba scholarship. In the current show, numerous works from our own Wotruba collection are united with loans from the artist’s Viennese estate – approximately 150 works in total. As a way of granting insight into this artist's personality, light is shed on two of its most characteristic aspects: Firstly, the working process of an artist who liked to refer to himself as a craftsman is presented on the basis of plaster casts, drawings, unrealized project sketches, photographic views of his studio and documentations of various kinds. Thanks to generous loans from the Wotruba-Verein, the artist’s large original plaster sculptures (preparatory works for bronze casts) are being shown for the first time ever, among them the spectacular monumental sculpture in honour of Richard Wagner in the uppermost gallery. Secondly, more than one hundred letters, manuscripts, books and photographs portray Wotruba as a man of thought. The artist was a critical author of articles, essays and speeches, cultivated intensive contact with numerous intellectuals and men of letters and was himself very well-read. In the exhibition, his relationships with Karl Kraus, Robert Musil, Elias Canetti and Jean Rudolf von Salis are the focus in the basement room of the south wing. In this context, one special highlight is the presentation of parts of his Musil holdings, the writer’s estate having been passed on to Wotruba after the death of the widow Martha Musil. Wotruba had provided the Musils with strong support during their exile in Geneva. Three audio stations on Kraus, Musil and Canetti introduce visitors to their literature with the aid of selected passages from their works.

Numerous wall texts draw attention to connections between art and literature or convey Wotruba’s personal thoughts and views about his art and the era in which he lived. Important works from the inventory of the Kamm Foundation Collection in the Kunsthaus Zug are also included – e.g. by Gustav Klimt, Josef Hoffmann, Richard Gerstl, Egon Schiele, Alexej von Jawlensky, Paul Klee, Oskar Schlemmer, and others – once purchased on Wotruba’s advice and to be viewed in close connection to his sculptures. Wotruba’s activities as artistic director of the Galerie Würthle in Vienna, which was in the possession of the Kamm family of Zug, is documented as yet another facet of this multifarious artist-personality. The exhibition spans a densely woven network of interrelationships of the kind typical of the Viennese Modernism, to which Wotruba considered himself an adherent after 1945.