This Austrian City Recognized for Its Mountaineering and Snowboarding Is Making Waves within the Artwork Scene

As I drove in to Dangerous Gastein, I might see the place specified by entrance of me like a diorama. Set in Austria’s Hohe Tauern mountains, it unfold throughout a valley and climbed up two vertiginous hillsides. On the prime had been tall Belle Époque buildings, with Artwork Nouveau and older homes sitting under them, and the roaring Dangerous Gastein Waterfall on the coronary heart of all of it. All of it resembled the set of a Wes Anderson movie — the previous Grand Hôtel de l’Europe, within the middle of city, is a useless ringer for the Grand Budapest Resort. 

Just a few years in the past, I began to listen to about Dangerous Gastein from art-world associates in Berlin, the place I stay. They informed me this small, quirky city — already a longtime snowboarding and mountaineering vacation spot — had grow to be a haven for creatives from round Europe and was making an attempt to foster an unbiased inventive scene on par with what was taking place in Joshua Tree, California, or Marfa, Texas. Final July, I lastly got down to see it for myself.

Dangerous Gastein, a 90-minute drive from Salzburg and simply reached by prepare from Berlin or Munich, has a layered historical past. Starting with the Celts within the fourth century B.C., it was a gold-mining space. Then, beginning within the sixteenth and carrying into the primary half of the twentieth century, it was principally recognized for the therapeutic qualities of its thermal springs. The city advanced right into a retreat the place intellectuals like Sigmund Freud summered and artists like Gustav Klimt went to sketch. Royals, together with Sisi, Empress Elisabeth of Austria, got here to its sanatoriums to take the waters. Ski resorts opened within the 1900s, making Dangerous Gastein an alpine vacation spot — the World Ski Championship was held there in 1958, and in the present day, the city has 4 ski areas with impressively steep terrain.

Within the mid Seventies, nonetheless, Dangerous Gastein’s glory began to fade, and lots of downtown buildings fell into decay. By the late Nineties, when the architect Ike Ikrath and his spouse, Evelyn — whose household ran Haus Hirt Resort & Spa, a Nineteen Twenties-era lodge that also operates in the present day — moved to city, it had a haunted, abandoned high quality. “The city was going bankrupt, and it was a catastrophe,” Evelyn Ikrath informed me. 

However generally, if the suitable seeds are planted, stunning issues can develop. Which is strictly what has occurred in Dangerous Gastein over the previous twenty years: artists from round Europe have created site-specific artwork initiatives, injecting new life into the city. In a time when many European ski resorts are grappling with local weather change, Dangerous Gastein has redefined itself as a winter sports activities vacation spot the place artwork is entrance and middle. 

After dropping my baggage on the Cōmodo — a Nineteen Sixties sanatorium that, in early 2023, was reborn as a 70-room lodge with a Midcentury Trendy aesthetic — I headed over to Kraftwerk, an deserted energy plant that has been remodeled right into a restaurant, non permanent studios, and an exhibition house. I used to be there to satisfy the Hamburg curator Andrea von Goetz for the opening of artwork:badgastein, a weeklong artwork truthful she had launched the 12 months earlier than. I discovered her in the course of a colorfully dressed crowd of collectors, artists, and gallerists, holding court docket.

“Once I got here with my household to Dangerous Gastein for the primary time within the early 2000s, it was a form of deserted, unusual place,” von Goetz mentioned, “however for me it appeared like a possibility, like a big piece of white paper.” Again then, she partnered with Doris Höhenwarter, who was working for the tourism board on the time; the Ikraths, who, over time, remade Haus Hirt into the trendy 33-key property it’s in the present day; and Olaf Krohne, who runs the smooth lodge Regina. In 2011, von Goetz and the group additionally began sommer.frische.kunst (“summer time.recent.artwork.”), an artist-residency program at Kraftwerk. 

In addition they curated an “Artwork Strolling Tour” with 15 site-specific artworks planted all through city and within the surrounding valleys and forests. One dramatic purple timber sculpture, Harfen (Harps), by the Berlin-based artist Olaf Holzapfel, was erected in close by Hohe Tauern Nationwide Park. The stroll is supposed as “a form of treasure hunt or pilgrimage,” Evelyn Ikrath informed me. “You possibly can spend a number of days mountaineering to search out them.” 

The strolling tour and the truthful made the artwork scene really feel playful and interactive. Gisela Clement, who owns a women-artist-focused gallery in Bonn, Germany, informed me one thing related. “All the opposite massive artwork festivals have gotten so industrial,” she mentioned. “This feels intimate and genuine.”

The subsequent day, I walked alongside the Kaiser Wilhelm Promenade, a forested path with a captivating espresso store, Café Schuh, and spectacular views of the valley under. Again on the town, I popped in to galleries showcasing up-and-coming artists. I used to be significantly taken with an set up by Pegasus Product, a Berlin-based collective of artists Dargelos Kersten, Anton Peitersen, and Gernot Seeliger. That they had created an “oracle” expertise that performed on the modern-day conception of wellness and spirituality: members paid to throw rubber strands onto a glass floor, which was X-rayed, after which sat in a chair and put their hand into a gap. A printed picture emerged, which was rolled up right into a Bic Cristal pen and made right into a necklace.

Later that night, at a dinner of about 200 folks celebrating sommer.frische.kunst on the mountain lodge Bellevue Alm, von Goetz was sitting on the head of a desk, a glass of glowing wine in her hand. She took within the joyful crowd and remarked that she felt happy to reach at this celebratory second, but in addition cautious. She didn’t need Dangerous Gastein to go the best way of different artwork hubs, appropriated by actual property builders and commercialized, with the artists squeezed out. If completed proper, the neighborhood might “construct a mountain metropolis prepared for the longer term,” she mentioned. And at that second, surrounded by optimistic creators and collectors, lots of them sporting their Pegasus Product pendants, I believed her.  

A model of this story first appeared within the February 2024 difficulty of Journey + Leisure beneath the headline “Out of the Field.“