Axel Heil

In the 1920s, the scholar of art and culture Aby Warburg (1866-1929) created his «Bilderatlas Mnemosyne» tracing recurring visual themes, gestures and patterns across time, from antiquity to the Renaissance and beyond to contemporary culture. Viewing pictures in this nonlinear way, with no accompanying text and outside of a museum, was radical 100 years ago. This is what makes this Atlas so relevant over time, even more so today. HKW, in Berlin, presents an exhibition where all 63 panels of the Atlas are reconstituted for the first time from Warburg’s original, multi-colored images.