In a constantly changing world, artists capture moments in time, creating permanence, preserving the past, and also emphasizing communities.

The permanent aspect of transience—vanitas (transience, vanity) in Latin—is also expressed in the genre of portraits. In a portrait, a single moment becomes timeless and is transformed into a form of cultural memory. Never neutral like a photograph, the portrait reflects the staging of the model as well as the artistic interpretation, a manifestation of the emotional proximity between a painter, the model, and the owner. It marks the presence of a person who is nevertheless absent. Even a dispassionate expression conveys something living and variable, since the beauty that is captured in a picture will inevitably fade. The visible appearance also reveals unseen aspects about the sitter’s personality.

The exhibition Moments in Time addresses the idea of vanitas in selected miniature paintings, in which this paradox makes the portrait the ideal medium for reflection about time and memory: Melancholy, longing, and awareness of mortality refer to the fragility of life. Sitters with jewels stand for beauty and allure as well as vanity and finiteness. Flowers or fruits held in their hands refer directly to their own ephemerality, their own unique symbolism, and even the smells that cannot be presented in a painting. The same applies to the depiction of musical instruments, whose sound quickly dissipates, and of sculptures, which are not alive. Letters, sheet music, and books are products of ephemeral interhuman relationships that stand for the voices of their creators that have faded away.

The natural cycle of life finds its analogy in the two-part work Sigrid (1930/2009) by German artist Karin Sander (b. 1957 in Bensberg, Germany). The portraits of Sigrid as a child, taken from a 1930 Pathé film, and as an old woman—both playing with a ball—link the modernist ready-made with the traditional idea of vanitas in miniature portraits.

Curated by Sonja Remensberger