Leopold Museum / Climate Change Center Austria: A Few Degrees More

Austria’s leading art institution - the Leopold Museum in Vienna - has staged an ingenious intervention within its esteemed galleries in a bid to highlight the dangers of climate change on our planet. 15 paintings including artworks by Gustave Courbet, Egon Schiele and Gustav Klimt, are hanging at an angle in the museum as part of the artistic action: ‘A Few Degrees More (Will Turn the World into an Uncomfortable Place)’. In 2022, museums became the arena for the most pressing issue of our time: the climate debate. A desperate way of warning us about the threats of global warming. A warning that scientists have been issuing for years: an increase of the world’s climate by over 1.5 degrees. Yet most people can’t seem to grasp the significance of this data. This observation was the motivation behind an unprecedented partnership of science with art, which saw scientists from the Climate Change Center Austria (CCCA), team up with the Leopold Museum in Austria’s capital city, and creative agency Wien Nord Serviceplan, to launch the intervention ‘A Few Degrees More’. People from all over the globe come to the Leopold Museum to learn about the beauty of our world through an artistic lens, through scenes of breathtaking natural beauty captured on canvas in paintings by iconic Avant-garde and modern artists including Egon Schiele, Gustav Klimt and Gustave Courbet. But this beauty is in danger. To show that just a few degrees more can turn the world into an uncomfortable place, we tilted the museum’s landscape paintings by the exact amount of degrees that temperatures will rise in the regions they depict. ‘A Few Degrees More’ was conceived by creative agency Wien Nord Serviceplan, who teamed up with the Leopold Museum and the Austrian climate research network CCCA, to create an action highlighting the detrimental effect of global warming on our planet. The Curated intervention during the ‘Vienna 1900: Birth of Modernism’ exhibition (ending on 26th June) is designed to raise awareness of climate change. Together with researchers from the Climate Change Centre Austria, Wien Nord Serviceplan calculated; the impact of a global increase in temperatures, how sea levels will rise; trees will vanish; and how biodiversity will diminish. Courbet’s cliffs represent rising sea levels, Schiele’s tree is a metaphor for dying flora, and Gerstl’s garden shows biodiversity. After 15 paintings in the Leopold Museum were tilted at an angle to represent increasing global temperatures, puzzled museum visitors were bemused about what had happened, generating discussion on social media and leading to extensive media coverage. After a week of leaving visitors guessing, the museum revealed the reason behind the intervention – on prime-time national TV and in newspapers and websites all over the world, on the exact day the UN climate report was published. Coverage included; ABC News, The Washington Post, Süddeutsche Zeitung, China Daily, ZDF, Reuters, Agence France Press, ORF and Buzzfeed.