Julius von Bismarck
Normale Katastrophe (Normality Bias)
KunstHausWien Museum Hundertwasser
Vienna, Austria
Sep 10, 2025 – Mar 8, 2026
Opening: Sep 9, 6-9.30 pm

He gives the sea a whipping, captures lightning bolts or paints whole landscapes. In powerful images facilitated by technological inventions and radical experimental settings, Julius von Bismarck explores human perception and the relationship we humans have to what we call “nature”. With Natural Disaster the KunstHausWien is staging the German artist’s first large solo exhibition in an Austrian institution.

Driven by a boundless spirit of experimentation, the artist combines scientific curiosity with artistic vision. His photographs, video works, sculptures and installations are visually stunning and do not shy away from grand gestures.

Whether wildfires, lightning strikes or huge storm waves and swells – the engagement with the natural forces of fire and water in a living environment we humans are increasingly changing is the leitmotif of the exhibition. The title Normal Disaster describes the state of a society continuously stricken by multiple crises, with far-reaching and unprecedented ecological and social changes becoming the new normality. Along with a selection of cross-media works from the last fifteen years, a series of new photographic works will be on show. Julius von Bismarck is also creating a site-specific intervention for the KunstHausWien’s greened inner courtyard.

Julius von Bismarck’s artistic research is oriented on action, with his works often emerging out of direct, physical engagement with the forces of nature. The works assembled in the exhibition deal with traditional images and narratives about nature: nature as a romanticised idyll, as an economic resource or as a vengeful, almost divine authority. Julius von Bismarck counters these ideas with new images, disconcertingly beautiful and contemplative in character – they almost make us forget the enormous power of nature and the immense physical commitment by the artist to produce them, enabling us to sense just how much our perception of nature is moulded by culture.

“In my view,” explains the artist, “what we think about nature or how we understand nature is strongly informed by images – when nature is represented in an image it’s called a landscape. I try to destroy the old, conventionalised images and create new ones.”

Julius von Bismarck is not looking for explanations with this creative research but rather experiences. Through the openness of his experiments he creates visual spaces which reveal the limits of our inherited traditional ways of seeing and initiate new perspectives on the relationship between humans and the environment. Amidst the very forces of nature, Normal Disaster addresses human hubris, responsibility and agency, challenging us to take another look and question the consequences our actions have on the environment.

Curator Sophie Haslinger