Anton Corbijn: Favourite Darkness
15 February to 29 June 2025
Cover picture: Anton Corbijn Jodie Foster, Hollywood 1995 © Anton Corbijn
Anton Corbijn (born 1955 in Strijen, Netherlands) is a photographer, director and designer who lives in Amsterdam. Since the 1970s, his images have had a decisive influence on the way we perceive pop culture.
The exhibition Anton Corbijn: Favourite Darkness at the Bank Austria Kunstforum Wien brings together around 200 works from five decades, including Corbijn's most famous photographs and a selection of his music videos from 1983 onwards, which look more like short auteur films.
The artist has also opened up his archive and is showing sketches for stage sets and album covers for the first time. Anton Corbijn made history as art director for Depeche Mode and created the visual identity of the band, with whom he has worked regularly since 1986, in the first place.
Image: Anton Corbijn Philip Seymour Hoffman, New York 2011 © Anton Corbijn
Countless artists from the fields of music, visual arts, literature and fashion have stood in front of Corbijn's camera. Many shots have become veritable icons - a term that Corbijn, the son of a Protestant pastor and a nurse, takes a critical view of.
Nevertheless, Corbijn's upbringing and the associated honest and sustained interest in people who create great things artistically are the key to understanding his visual language. His portraits always show the person behind the celebrity. He places his protagonists in unorthodox settings, photographs them from very close up and creates moments full of intimacy, trust and surprise.
His often unconventionally composed portraits are characterised by their graininess and deliberate underexposure. Many of his pictures are also dark and melancholy in a metaphorical sense.
Image:Anton Corbijn Self Portrait, London 1987 © Anton Corbijn
Anton Corbijn: Favourite Darkness is Anton Corbijn's first solo exhibition in Vienna and takes place on the occasion of his 70th birthday.
Parallel to the exhibition, a retrospective of Anton Corbijn's film work will be held at the Gartenbaukino cinema in Vienna.
Curated by Lisa Ortner-Kreil
