Dear Mon Oc
Last year I was in Vienna for a meeting to discuss the relocation of a piece of sculpture the city had bought 20 years before. The meeting didn’t take that long and I found myself with a lot of free time.
It was freezing cold as I walked around and I didn’t really have a warm enough coat. So when I passed the 
Albertina, I thought I would go inside. Once inside, I saw that the exhibition downstairs was of two tone woodcuts of the late Renaissance and early Baroque selected from the collections of the Albertina and of Georg Baselitz.
I didn’t know what to expect – I suppose something along the lines of the Durer woodcuts, which are included, but the rest were truly something else.
The size of some of the works was far beyond anything I would have expected from a wood cut – the largest was almost two metres long! The use of two colours from the same or additional block inflects the image in subtle ways, making it pulse with space and light.
I was captivated and stayed for three hours – what a wonderful surprise it was to discover a whole world of artwork that I had been unaware of!
And then I found out that the exhibition is coming to the Academy (15th March – 8th June) and I get to repeat my acquaintance.
This is a great exhibition and I want to encourage as many people as possible to discover it for themselves, it won’t come round again for a long time.
Durer was clearly master of illustration as well as wood-cuts !