Unknown Familiars brings the unknown to the table. With the works presented in the Leopold Museum, a total of six collections with different focuses and trajectories of development come together for the first time. All of the works on display come from the collections of companies belonging to the Vienna Insurance Group and Wiener Städtische Versicherungsverein, whose 200th anniversary brings them together as part of a family.

The exhibition presents over 200 works of 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. Starting from the collection of the Czech insurance company Kooperativa, which is represented with a selection of works from the period 1900–1950, a web of thematic and stylistic references is woven that continues in the dialogue with the other works. The Austrian collections of Wiener Städtische, Wiener Städtische Versicherungsverein and Donau Versicherung, together with that of BTA Baltic, cover a broad spectrum from classical Modernism to current contemporary practices. The collection of the Serbian Wiener Städtische osiguranje, on the other hand, primarily looks back to the events of the Yugoslavian avant-garde in the second half of the 20th century. And even if only certain works in the exhibition can be categorised as historical Surrealism in the narrowest sense, the surreal can be found in numerous objects in the show, regardless of when they were created.

Unknown Familiars removes some of the cornerstones with which we have become familiar when viewing art in favour of an encounter with the new. The familiar – the familial – shifts towards an unfamiliar perspective.