Unknown Familiars places unknowns in the room. With the highlights presented in the Leopold Museum, a total of six collections come together for the first time. Despite their different focuses and development histories, they are unknown familiars, relatives unknown to one another, because all the works shown come from the collections of companies that are connected to the Vienna Insurance Group and are part of the 200th anniversary of the Wiener Städtische Versicherungsverein gathering as part of a family for the first time. Works from the Czech Kooperativa were already shown in the Leopold Museum in 2007, and in 2010 parts of the collections from Wiener Städtische, Wiener Städtische Versicherungsverein and Donau Versicherung were also shown. Now excerpts from the collections of the Serbian Wiener Städtische Osiguranje and the Latvian BTA Baltic are also presented.

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Getting to know each other is therefore not just the responsibility of the audience, but also of the collections themselves, which meet and complement each other through a precise selection of works. The presentation, which covers an entire floor of the Leopold Museum, includes over 200 works in various genres from different periods. Young contemporary art meets the modernism of the interwar period, the avant-garde of the 1970s meets important positions of the Austrian present.

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Starting from the collection of the Czech insurance company Kooperativa, which is represented by a selection of works from the period 1900 to 1950, a web of thematic and stylistic references emerges, which emerges in dialogue and selective overlap with the works from the other collections continues. The Vienna collections, together with those of the BTA Baltic, represent a broad spectrum from classical modernity to current contemporary practices. The Serbian collection, on the other hand, looks back primarily on the events of the Yugoslav avant-garde in the second half of the 20th century through the medium of photography. And even if only individual works in the exhibition can be assigned to historical surrealism in the narrower sense, such as TOYEN's Klamná krajina [Deceptive Landscape] from 1937, surrealism can be found in numerous objects in the show, regardless of the time of their creation.

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Supported by an unusual display and an associatively designed exhibition course, Unknown Familiars removes many of the cornerstones of familiar art viewing in favor of an encounter with the new. The exhibition as well as the accompanying publication position an oblique light that puts the familiar - familiar - into an unfamiliar perspective.