Press conference:Wednesday, March 4, 2020, 10 am

Opening:Thursday, March 5, 2020, 7 pm

Duration of the exhibition:March 6 through Julne 21, 2020

Press contact

Katharina Murschetz T +43 1 52500-1400 katharina.murschetz@mumok.at

Katja KulidzhanovaT +43 1 52500-1450katja.kulidzhanova@mumok.at

press@mumok.at www.mumok.at

mumok – Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig WienMuseumsplatz 1, 1070 Vienna

Ingeborg StroblEat / Horse, 1996©1996 Ingeborg Strobl / Bildrecht WienPhoto: © mumok

Having LivedIngeborg Strobl

Ingeborg Strobl’s oeuvre is moored in the tradition of conceptual and intermedia art. Natural and animal subjects acting as mirror images of society take up a central role in her objects, installations, collages, paintings, photographs, films, and publications. Also evident in her work is a predilection for the marginal, the hidden, that which is all-too easy to overlook or repress as well as a concomitant aversion to obsessive production and consumption. Recognizing and valuing the peripheral is an aspect that also comes to the fore in the media in which she worked. Printed matter such as publications, posters, and invitation cards are themselves artistically rendered compo-nents of her oeuvre.

Strobl donated her archive with numerous works and printed matter to mumok. This archival material is the centerpiece of the retrospective, which was conceived in col-laboration with the artist—before her death in April 2017—and gives a representative overview of her comprehensive oeuvre.

The exhibition is focused on—previously rarely shown—early ceramics, which the artist created during her studies in London. Strobl’s sense of beauty that is hidden in transient things as well as the fugacity of all magnificence is already manifest in these early works. In a multitude of detailed colored-pencil drawings from the 1970s, she translates the ceramic works’ surreal illusionism into the pictorial. With this, Strobl creates the foundation for the visual poetry that runs like a thread through her work—as it is characteristic of her paintings with collaged image and text inserts. These were in part conceived and created like diary-like “notes,” in which personal and private matter coalesce with contemporary history.

On her travels to countries of the former Eastern Bloc, Asia, and Africa, Strobl com-bined her eye for nature with a focus on sociocultural and sociopolitical transitional scenarios. She primarily chose places where the ravages of time have left their marks. It is, for instance, particularly her photos and videos of rampant nature reclaiming and destroying traces of civilization that depict historical upheaval, such as the rapid societal changes in post-Communist Europe. Far from any escapism, her interest in decay, death, and finitude, which continually shines through in her work—for instance, in the myriad photographs of cemeteries—must be interpreted as an astute study of the living as well as a deep interest in the present and the things to come.

Also in the production and dissemination of her filmic works, the artist circumvents conventions of elaboration and exclusivity. Most of her videos are available publicly on YouTube, on a channel named Inga Troger, her mother’s maiden name. All this assembles to form a jigsaw puzzle in which the ephemeral, the fragile, the seemingly incidental—captured with subtle poetry and critical esprit—is actually the constant and succinct element in her work.

Her work’s irony-tinged rigor also shows in the use of language as a recurring artistic motif. Observations on the art scene and social developments are as much subject to an artistic translation into language as are natural elements. Her photo novels blend her penchant for films, photographs, and language in books.

A catalogue with texts by Wolfgang Kos, Maren Lübbke-Tidow and Rainer Fuchs as well as an interview by Gabriele Jurjevec-Koller with Ingeborg Strobl will be publis-hed in conjunction with the exhibition.

BiographyIngeborg Strobl (b. 1949, d. 2017) studied graphics at the University of Applied Arts Vienna from 1967 to 1972. From 1972 to 1974, she attended the Royal College of Art in London, where she earned a master of arts degree in ceramics. In the 1970s, she predominantly worked in ceramics and graphic design. In 1987, she and Ona B., Evelyne Egerer, and Birgit Jürgenssen founded the feminist artist collective DIE DAMEN, of which she remained a member until 1992. From 1999 to 2001, Strobl taught design to art educators at the University of Applied Arts as a visiting professor. Solo exhibitions (selection): Landesmuseum Joanneum, Graz (1974); Secession, Vien-na (1992); Galerie Stadtpark, Krems (1993); Kunsthaus Bregenz (1999); Fotogalerie Wien (2013); Wien Museum (2015); LENTOS Linz (2016)Awards: Art Prize of the City of Vienna for Graphic Design and painting (1993); Appreciation Award of the Province of Styria for Fine Art (2000); Appreciation Award for Artistic Photography of the Austrian Federal Ministry for Education, Arts and Cul-ture (2008)

Curated by Rainer Fuchs

Steve Reinke: Butter

“My work wants me dead, I know. It is all it ever talks about,” writes Steve Reinke in a correspondence on the occasion of his exhibition at mumok. Death and life, empa-thy and cruelty, sex and intimacy—it’s the “big” questions the artist (born 1963 in Eganville, Canada; lives in Chicago, USA) is after in his work. In the best Nietzschean manner, however, Reinke considers human beings not political or moral entities but puppets of microbiotic agendas: Instead of the Freudian ego and id, it is bacteria, placentae, and plankton that rule the world in his videos; “culture” designates not humanistic achievement but life in a petri dish. In his first solo museum show, Reinke presents his new video An Arrow Pointing to a Hole as well as a selection of sinister text images and absentminded needlepoints, all of which, in a paradoxically precise manner, tell stories of loss of control, formlessness, and self-abandon.

As an artist and writer, Reinke is best known for his monolog-based videos, among them The Hundred Videos (1989–1996), which he programmatically conceived as an “early work.” In these five hours of video material, Reinke, by furnishing found, filmed, and animated images with confessional comments, blurs the boundary between documentary and fiction, thus anticipating the narcissistic structure of our current social media landscape. In 2006, Reinke started a new cycle titled Final Thoughts, to which the work presented at mumok also belongs and which will be concluded at the time of the artist’s death. Whereas questions of libido and Eros—that is, life-affirming principles—were often central in earlier works, Final Thoughts is dedicated to their an-tagonists. Reinke is considering the end of things—of language, consciousness, and experience—and thus of his own person. In the nocturnal monologue scene An Arrow Pointing to a Hole the artist is physically omnipresent—as a face, sonorous voice, and tattooed body—but the existence of a realm beyond this naked manifestation is categorically called into question. He lost his subconscious already as a boy, as the narrator wants us to believe, and since then, the chorus of his microbiome has been doing the talking: “My guts, my guts were humming. They have been humming ever since, and I mostly do whatever they say.” Has the prophecy come true? Is Reinke, the subject, dead? Hard to say. What is very much alive is his quest for dissolving the grammatical fiction of the “I”—for forms without structure, without a face, without perspective.

Both Reinke’s text images and his needlepoints reify such yearning for a loss of form. Grounded in the practice of notetaking and doodling, they are images that refuse to be images, strange hybrids of precise execution and nebulous contents. The drawi-ngs of words and phrases on which the series of silkscreen prints Portfolio A, B, C, D (2016–2019) is based, for example, are made with ink dripping from an eyedropper. The line is hard to control—painting rather than writing—and lends phrases such as “Amoeba Navigates Labyrinth” or “Strong Corpse Weak Ghost” an erratic expression. The needlepoint embroideries Reinke has been making for about ten years are simi-larly contradictory objects—“really slow, crafty doodles,” as the artist writes. Reinke produces them without either plan or intention: One color follows another; patterns emerge and are abandoned. The result is an innocent quasi-abstract object, its back as important as its front, whose only function is to indicate killed time.

Press conference:Wednesday, March 4, 2020, 10 am

Opening:Thursday, March 5, 2020, 7 pm

Duration of the exhibition:March 6 through June 21, 2020

Steve ReinkeUntitled (needlepoint), 2017Courtesy courtesy of the artist and gallery Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin

Press contact

Katharina Murschetz T +43 1 52500-1400 katharina.murschetz@mumok.at

Katja KulidzhanovaT +43 1 52500-1450katja.kulidzhanova@mumok.at

press@mumok.at www.mumok.at

mumok – Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig WienMuseumsplatz 1, 1070 Vienna

The first book in the German-speaking world about Steve Reinke’s work will be published in conjunction with this exhibition. Along with a preface by the curator, the book will feature texts by Laura U. Marks, Jaakko Pallasvuo, Kerstin Stakemeier, Samo Tomšič, and Reinke himself.

Thanks to the Isabella Bortolozzi Gallery, Berlin, and the Alice Kaplan Institute of Humanities at Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, for their support of this publication.

Curated by Manuela Ammer

Press conference:Wednesday, April 29, 2020, 10 am

Exhibition opening:Thursday, April 30, 2020, 7 pm

ANDY WARHOL EXHIBITS a glitte-ring alternativeMay 1 through September 6, 2020

DEFROSTING THE ICEBOXGuesting at mumok: The Hidden Collections of the Antiques Collection of Kunsthistorisches Mu-seum Wien and Weltmuseum Wien May 1 through September 6, 2020

MISFITTING TOGETHER. Serial For-mations of Pop Art, Minimal Art, and Conceptual ArtMay 1 through August 16, 2020

Press contact

Katharina Murschetz T +43 1 52500-1400 katharina.murschetz@mumok.at

Katja KulidzhanovaT +43 1 52500-1450katja.kulidzhanova@mumok.at

Fax +43 1 52500-1300press@mumok.at www.mumok.at

mumok – Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig WienMuseumsplatz 1, 1070 Vienna

Andy Warholmumok Celebrates the Artist with Three Exhibitions in 2020

From May 1, 2020, mumok will devote three exhibitions to the phenomenon that is Andy Warhol (b. August 6, 1928 in Pittsburgh, PA; d. February 22, 1987 in New York City). Along with well-known classics, mumok will present rarely shown works and look behind the facade of the world-famous Pop Art icon to rediscover Warhol’s capabilities as a groundbreaking exhibition curator and installation artist.

Few people know that Warhol forbade the presentation of his early works—i.e., works created before 1962—already during his lifetime and controlled the way they were perceived in a very deliberate manner. Starting with the Campbell’s Soup Can show at the Ferus Gallery in 1962, Warhol’s follow-up exhibits in the early 1960s each focused on the presentation of a single serial subject: Campbell’s Soup Cans, Brillo Boxes, Flowers, Disasters, and Celebrity Portraits. Andy Warhol created an image that was geared to the public and has successfully shaped his reception to this day.

With two shows—ANDY WARHOL EXHIBITS a glittering alternative and the homage to Warhol’s seminal project RAID THE ICEBOX 1 with Andy Warhol—mumok presents the very first exemplary overview of the polymath artist’s exhibition practices without letting his early and late works fall by the wayside. This broad cross section opens new perspectives on the myriad media Warhol used and shows that his modes of pre-sentation should be understood as an essential part of his oeuvre.

The related collection exhibition, MISFITTING TOGETHER. Serial Formations of Pop Art, Minimal Art, and Conceptual Art faces the challenge not only of situating Warhol in the field of Pop Art but also of painting a more nuanced picture of the times by including works of Minimal and Conceptual Art—both collection emphases of Peter and Irene Ludwig. Juxtaposing these movements will show how strongly they have influenced each other and how hard it is to pigeonhole them art-historically.

The three exhibitions are accompanied by a numerous satellite events.

ANDY WARHOL EXHIBITS a glittering alternative ANDY WARHOL EXHIBITS peeks behind the artist’s aforementioned public image, placing aspects of Warhol’s cosmos at center stage that have thus far gone virtually unexamined. Two sides of his “dual persona”—the much-quoted, staged persona on the one hand and the hidden one, barely noticed by the public, on the other—are contrasted on two levels of the mumok. The entrance level deals with Warhol’s cura-torial intentions and prevailing motifs and abstractions of the 1950s. On display are the Blotted Line prints and drawings exploring the male body, drag practices, and homoerotic symbols and gestures—a range of topics that would occupy the artist until his death. The exhibition spans works from Warhol’s first exhibition, Fifteen Drawings Based on the Writings of Truman Capote (1952), to never before presented marblei-zed paper sculptures (1954), rarely shown Drag Drawings (1953), and book projects such as In the Bottom of My Garden (1958).

Andy WarholCow Wallpaper [Pink on Yellow], 1966, Reprint 1994© The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh IA1994.7/Licensed by Bildrecht Wien, 2019

The selected works illustrate Warhol’s early immersion in iconographically clearly defined series—especially his interest in gender performance variations as well as the development of a specific visual vocabulary that keeps cropping up in various con-texts. Given the disclosure of this system, Andy Warhol’s early works can no longer easily be pigeonholed as “commercial.”

The second level turns the spotlight on Warhol’s exhibition practices from the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s, concentrating on presenting individual work series in different media. This section addresses the densely interwoven nature of the artist’s work and mode of presentation.

A comprehensive academic compendium will be published in conjunction with the exhibition, including texts by Marianne Dobner, Naoko Kaltschmidt, Natalie Musteata, Neil Printz, Nina Schleif, and Jennifer Sichel, who approach Warhol’s rich exhibition history in a variety of ways.

Curated by Marianne Dobner

DEFROSTING THE ICEBOXGuesting at mumok: The Hidden Collections of the Antiques Collection of Kunsthis-torisches Museum Wien and Weltmuseum Wien Concomitantly, Andy Warhol will also dominate another level of the mumok: RAID THE ICEBOX 1 with Andy Warhol is seen as one of the earliest examples of a collection exhibition curated by an artist. Warhol worked with the holdings of the Museum of Art at the Rhode Island School of Design and conceived a traveling exhibition, which opened on October 29, 1969 at the Institute for the Arts at Rice University in Hous-ton, continued on January 17, 1970 at the Isaac Delgado Museum in New Orleans, and finally returned to its point of origin, the Museum of Art at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence on April 23, 1970.

Though the Warhol-curated exhibition did not feature any works by the artist himself, it contained several presentation strategies that broke with traditional museum stan-dards: Instead of prioritizing the visual arts, Warhol exhibited the applied arts. Instead of applying a classification system of chronology, medium, or style, he presented the objects in an ahistorical, nonhierarchical form. The museum storage became an exhi-bition; what had almost been forgotten was placed in the limelight. Following War-hol’s curatorial principles, mumok takes this exhibition as an occasion to implement those unusual presentation strategies in so important a historic collection as that of Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum. A format that not only ties in with mumok’s past collection exhibitions (e.g., Oh…Jakob Lena Knebl and the mumok Collection, 2017, or Always, Always, Others, 2016) but also picks up on a core concept of the collector couple Ludwig, who instead of presenting works statically preferred a constant swap of the collection holdings, thus clearly breaking with tradition.

In keeping with Warhol’s motto of “raiding the icebox,” mumok will devote an entire level to the Antiques Collection’s and Weltmuseum Wien’s storages. Taking inspiration from Warhol’s atypical list of works—among other things, he presented 2 vases, 7 blankets, 9 baskets, 10 hat boxes, 11 keys, 12 sculptures (copies), 12 wallpapers, 17 chairs, 57 umbrellas, and 194 pairs of shoes—the focus here is placed on selected works from the Weltmuseum Collection (Warhol was a fanatic collector of American Folk Art) as well as Greek and Roman sculpture fragments from the Antiques Collec-tion.

The exhibition title DEFROSTING THE ICEBOX is based on a text by the curator and art historian Natalie Musteata: “Defrosting the Icebox: A Contextual Analysis of Andy Warhol’s Raid the Icebox 1,” in Journal of Curatorial Studies, vol. 5, no. 2 (2016), pp. 214–237.

Curated by Marianne Dobner

MISFITTING TOGETHER. Serial Formations of Pop Art, Minimal Art, and Conceptual Art“I was reflecting that most people thought the Factory was a place where everybody had the same attitudes about everything; the truth was, we were all odds-and-ends misfits, somehow misfitting together.” (Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett, POPism: The Warhol Sixties, London 2007/1980, p. 276)

Andy Warhol’s titular words serve as the starting point for the third exhibition. The artist’s last exhibition at mumok was in 1981, when he was still alive. Some forty years later, it seems long overdue to present his oeuvre in a comprehensive, art-histo-rical context. Referencing Mel Bochner’s Artforum article “The Serial Attitude” (1967), the collection show explores the serial order as a link of all threeart movements. As Bochner already stated in 1967, serial arrangement is a method, not a style. Seriality should be understood not as formalized playfulness but as artistic strategy with clear-ly defined underlying processes, often from the fields of mathematics and language. Bochner distinguishes between modular and serial ideas: Modular works are based on the repetition of one standardized unit that doesn’t change its basic form and the-refore depict a temporal moment (e.g., Robert Indiana, Love Rising / Black and White Love (For Martin Luther King), 1968), while serial works follow a logical sequence and therefore depict a temporal progression (e.g., Sol LeWitt, Form Derived from a Cube, 1986). Both approaches can be found in all three movements and are confronted with each other in the exhibition.

It is hardly a secret that aside from being a phenomenon of Warhol’s times, the con-cept of seriality also played a crucial role in his work. Nonetheless, the Nonetheless, the exhibition aims to introduce a process-based serial concept that ought not to be understood in the sense of dully repeating the same subject over and over but rather as a fascination with diversity and difference within a series.

Thus Warhol creates not one Boy Drawing, for instance, but an undefined number of Boy Drawings, and also continues this serial concept in other series of drawings.

Instead of one final result, it was the steadily changing process that was at the heart of Warhol’s serial concept. A similar method can be seen in contemporaries like Han-ne Darboven, Sol LeWitt, or Gordon Matta-Clark. The latter’s work Walls Paper (1972) will be displayed for the first time at mumok in this exhibition. The serial arrange-ment of individual sheets and motifs, the interconnection of different media and the wall-covering hang bear strong parallels with Warhol.

The presentation of assorted works from the mumok Collection expands the exhibiti-on focus on Andy Warhol by some important facets: Mouse Museum (1965/77) and Ray Gun Wing (1961/77) by Claes Oldenburg are among the major works of Pop Art and, because they are walk-in installations, can be regarded as miniature museums. Presented as a counterpart to Oldenburg’s installations is FIREARMS (2019), a work by the recently deceased artist Lutz Bacher that became part of the mumok Col-lection through an acquisition by the Ludwig Foundation. In her serial work, Bacher draws a portrait of firearms as commodities of international trade as well as historical, much-sought-after collector’s objects.

Artists: Lutz Bacher, Alighiero Boetti, Daniel Buren, Hanne Darboven, Jan Dibbets, Heinz Gappmayr, Robert Indiana, On Kawara, Joseph Kosuth, Sol LeWitt, Roy Lichten-stein, Gordon Matta-Clark, Dóra Maurer, Claes Oldenburg, Friederike Petzold, Larry Poons, Charlotte Posenenske, Peter Roehr, Robert Smithson, Daniel Spoerri, Andy Warhol

Curated by Marianne Dobner and Naoko Kaltschmidt

Ane Mette Hol. Becoming (working title)

Ane Mette Hol explores marginal phenomena of art production. Her eye locked on minor matter—items that fall on the ground while making art in the studio, for instan-ce, or traces left in an exhibition space after installing the works—she sharpens the viewers’ awareness of the conditions surrounding artistic production.

A piece of packing paper randomly dropped on the floor, indicating that the exhibition space was only recently painted—splattered dispersion paint complete with specks of dust; color checkers and gray cards used in reproduction photography to adjust the exposure so that the picture is as close to the depicted object as possible; lined notebooks or sketchbooks decorated with pencils or other visual clichés, stacks of paper and packaging material: on closer inspection all these inconspicuous materials and scraps turn out to be detailed, perfectly rendered drawings.

The high level of precision on which Ane Mette Hol operates in her drawn objects, the meticulous rigor with which she imitates shades and color nuance, and the deliberate deceleration she applies to her own work process—all this contributes to her recali-brating the relationship between production and reproduction. Worthless objects like packaging materials, a shipping box, and stacks of paper are exhibited as photore-alistic images and in reference to ostensibly anachronistic genres like the trompe l’oeil. Although Hol’s drawing and astute manipulation bespeak almost excessive affirmation, the objects themselves remain off-the-shelf commodities and disposable goods—elements of a throwaway society. In Hol’s artistic recycling process, however, the parameters of artmaking and the artist’s contemplations become visible via her own tools.

Ane Mette Hol not only uses conventional drawing materials like pencils, charcoal, or pastels but also picks up unusual ones such as wax, silver, and acrylic lacquer. The ar-tist analyzes surface textures and reconstructs them in a painstaking, lengthy process. In doing so, she often transfers her drawings’ carrier material from one specific state into another—a transformation that brings out supposed readymades, mirror images or picture puzzles of reality, and “simulacra,” at once strange and fascinating copies without originals.

BiographyAne Mette Hol (b. 1979 in Bodø, raised in Trondheim, lives and works in Oslo, Nor-way) studied at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts and the Konstfack University of Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm. From 2009 to 2010, she participated in the International Studio Programme of Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin and, in 2016, in the WIELS Residency Programme in Brussels. Numerous solo and group exhibitions in institutions, art spaces, and galleries such as Sint-Lukasgalerie, Brussels, BE; La Kunsthalle Mulhouse, FR; Trondheim kunstmuseum, NO; Kunstmuseum Bremerha-ven, DE; KARST Projects, Plymouth, GB; Ludwig Forum Aachen, DE; CENTRALE for contemporary art, Brussels, BE; OSL contemporary, Oslo, NO; Galerie Kadel Willborn, Düsseldorf, DE.

Curated by Franz Thalmair

Press conferenceWednesday, July 1, 2020, 10 am

Opening:Thursday, July 2, 2020, 7 pm

Exhibition duration:July 3 through October 18, 2020

Ane Mette HolGrey Literature, 2018Randi Thommessen Collection© Ane Mette Hol

Press contact

Katharina Murschetz T +43 1 52500-1400 katharina.murschetz@mumok.at

Katja KulidzhanovaT +43 1 52500-1450katja.kulidzhanova@mumok.at

Fax +43 1 52500-1300press@mumok.at www.mumok.at

mumok – Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig WienMuseumsplatz 1, 1070 Vienna

Press contact

Katharina Murschetz T +43 1 52500-1400 katharina.murschetz@mumok.at

Katja KulidzhanovaT +43 1 52500-1450katja.kulidzhanova@mumok.at

Fax +43 1 52500-1300press@mumok.at www.mumok.at

mumok – Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig WienMuseumsplatz 1, 1070 Vienna

Museum of Desires II

Ten years after becoming the director of mumok, Karola Kraus and her team pre-sent a collection exhibition, spanning from Classical Modernism to current positions. It integrates pivotal donations and acquisitions from the past decade, which have deepened the mumok Collection and given it new accents. The exhibition is at once review and outlook. With an eye on the past few years, it puts new perspectives up for discussion that are simultaneously the basis for the museum’s future collecting and exhibiting activities.

mumok’s specific collection profile, with its focus on the fields of Classical Moder-nism, Pop Art, Nouveau Réalisme and Fluxus, Vienna Actionism and performance art, Conceptual Art, and Minimal Art as well as more recent positions from the 1980s on-ward that build on these holdings, forms a highly diverse frame of reference—in terms of both subject matter and media—for the museum’s collection policy. It has always been our goal to use this frame of reference as a potential, broaden it, and give it new accents.

For her inaugural exhibition, Museum of Desires, Karola Kraus and her team linked innovative means of presentation with bold strategic acquisition goals. The challenges for mumok have always consisted not only in honing its content and recalibrating its collection but also in securing or gaining the financial means necessary for this en-deavor. As the federally allocated budget was far from exhaustive, Museum of Desires aimed to intensify existing cooperation with patrons and sponsors and to motivate them to help the museum gain access to pivotal new works for the collection. The exhibition had been conceived to reassess and expand the collection by including works that were able to render more precisely mumok’s collection focus and to allevi-ate extant deficits.

The success of Museum of Desires as well as the large number of donations in recent years hint at an eagerness for personal commitment. Along with the valuable and continued support of the Austrian Ludwig Foundation, which to date has acquired seventy-seven essential works for mumok, and the Society of Friends of the Fine Arts, it is first and foremost the involvement of private supporters, collectors, artists, and the mumok board that is to thank for the collection’s expansion of about 930 donated works since 2011.

In the field of Classical Modernism, mumok received a generous donation from the Eckhardt-Gramatté Foundation in Winnipeg, Canada, of fifty-two works of German ar-tist Walter Grammatté, who died in 1929 at the young age of thirty-two. One focus in these new acquisitions was governed by the collection policy goal to integrate more works by women artists into genres and collection fields dominated by men—from Pop Art and painting of the 1970s to contemporary art. And so, important works by Evelyne Axell, Monika Baer, Tess Jaray, Tina Girouard, Jutta Koether, Kiki Kogelnik,

Press conference:Thursday, September 24, 2020, 10 am

Exhibition opening:Friday, September 25, 2020, 7 pm

Exhibition duration:September 26, 2020 through May 2, 2021

Maja VukojeUntitled, 2013Acquired with support of BKA, Sektion Kunst©Maja Vukoje

Elke Krystufek, Ree Morton, Ulrike Müller, Miriam Schapiro, Cosima von Bonin, and Maja Vukoje found their way into the collection. Because of the geopolitical locati-on of Vienna at the heart of Europe and mumok’s concomitant function as a bridge between Western and Eastern Europe, the expansion of the museum’s holdings with works of the Eastern European neo-avant-garde is a central concern. In recent years, the collection grew with works by Geta Brătescu, Július Koller, the Sigma group, and Mladen Stilinović but also with works by younger artists, such as Mladen Bizumic, Flaka Haliti, and Nikita Kadan. Additionally, we were able to include works by John Baldessari, André Cadere, Isa Genzken, Dan Flavin, Ray Johnson, Jakob Lena Knebl, Hermann Nitsch, Albert Oehlen, Fred Sandback, Cy Twombly, Nadim Vardag, Franz West, and Heimo Zobernig to fill some gaps in the various collection fields. Our me-dia art and photography holdings were also fleshed out with further essential works by Phil Collins, Sharon Lockhart, Dorit Margreiter, Cindy Sherman, Wolfgang Tillmans, and James Welling. Finally, our collection was enriched by the estates of Heimrad Bäcker, Kurt Kren, Ernst Schmidt jr. ,and Ingeborg Strobl as well as the archives of the museum in progress.

The collection’s vitality and topicality are largely owed to the constant exchange and continued dialogue between what exists and what is new, between internal circum-stances and arrivals from outside. This also holds true for the relationship between collection exhibitions and special shows, with which mumok aims to keep expanding its international renown in the near future.

Curated by Karola Kraus and the curatorial team of mumok

Press contact

Katharina Murschetz T +43 1 52500-1400 katharina.murschetz@mumok.at

Katja KulidzhanovaT +43 1 52500-1450katja.kulidzhanova@mumok.at

Fax +43 1 52500-1300press@mumok.at www.mumok.at

mumok – Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig WienMuseumsplatz 1, 1070 Vienna

Heimo Zobernig

Painting, along with sculpture, film, performance, and design, is a central component of the intermedia art of Heimo Zobernig (b. 1958 in Mauthen, Austria). Since the be-ginning of his artistic practice in the early 1980s, the artist has built up a comprehen-sive painterly oeuvre, always based on his attempt to explore color like a “scientist.” Thus, in Zobernig’s work, painting has become a machine for the creation of insight. Characteristics of the artist’s method in this context are strategies of simplification, standardization, and systematization using predefined rules and the artistic appropria-tion of industrial norms and widespread samples (such as TV test patterns).

After mumok’s presentation of the consistent and yet utter multifaceted development of the probably internationally most famous living Austrian artist in a big exhibition in winter 2002/2003, the new show will place its emphasis on Zobernig’s paintings, with select recent groups of works. The artist designed the exhibition architecture himself. With it, Zobernig references the classical-modernist architecture of the Sonsbeek Pavilion, which the Dutch designer Gerrit Rietvield created for a sculpture presentation in Arnheim in 1955.

Heimo Zobernig’s expanded concept of painting is already clearly visible in early works from the mid-1980s, when he produced both paintings with abstract geome-tric shapes and first cardboard sculptures coated with monochrome synthetic resin paint.

In the mid-1990s, Zobernig again brought the principle of transfer into play by trans-posing so-called chroma key colors from video technology (bluescreen blue, video blue, video red, and video green) into the realm of painting. Although the various work phases generally hint at or bear reference to the avantgarde playbook and its traditions (monochromes and grids, minimalism, color-field painting, gestural and geometric abstraction, or text art), contemporary culture and its technological visual media are also discernible as an important influence. Such ambivalences are a recur-ring motif in Zobernig’s art. He calls it his “unequivocal commitment to equivocality”. His grid images, produced from 2000 onward, again make use of chroma key nettle textures as their medium, coated with white acrylic paint to create different checke-red and gridlike structures. Along with the previous main motifs of monochromes and grids, the lasting impression a 2011 Pablo Picasso exhibition left on the artist also reveals a third motif in Zobernig’s work: the gestural.Art appears as a vast, contradictory field of research in Heimo Zobernig’s work—to which one must relate in a variety of ways. Art appears as both a demonstration item and the object of analysis. Early on, the artist described himself in this regard as a “historian” and “scientist”.

Press conference:Thursday, September 24, 2020, 10 am

Exhibition opening:Friday, September 25, 2020, 7 pm

Exhibition duration:September 26, 2020 through January 31, 2021

Heimo ZobernigUntitled, 2019Courtesy Galerie Meyer Kainer, WienPhoto: Archiv Heimo Zobernig

Processes of artistic production and material aesthetics as well as the examination of display and architecture or the challenge of the working mechanisms of museums and galleries can all be found in Heimo Zobernig’s work. Even the catalogues’ gra-phic design is subject to this system and thus becomes an important part of Zober-nig’s artistic practice. His own role as an artist appears like an attitude in motion that he constantly explores and develops.

The planned publication, (co-)designed by Heimo Zobernig, is a conceptual compani-on piece to the book accompanying the 2003 retrospective, which Zobernig humoro-usly titled Katerlog—a formal counterpart, as the artist again uses the Din-A4 format and the Helvetica font, but also—and importantly—a companion in terms of content, as it continues the painstakingly encyclopedic lists of Zobernig’s artistic work and exhibition practice up to the very date of publication (albeit absent any claims to com-pleteness). The publication thus spans Zobernig’s wide range of artistry and media, while at the same time keeping a skeptical tongue in cheek regarding any attempt to be “scientific” about an artistic oeuvre.

BiographyHeimo Zobernig (born 1958 in Mauthen, Austria, lives in Vienna). He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna from 1977 to 1980 and at the University of Applied Arts Vienna from 1980 to 1985. In 1994/1995 he was a guest professor at the University of Fine Arts of Hamburg. In 1999/2000 he taught sculpture at the Städelschule in Frankfurt. Since 2000 he has been Professor of sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Selected solo exhibitions and Prizes: Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb (2019); Sharjah Arts Museum, Sharjah (2018); MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambrid-ge, MA (1917); Roswitha Haftmann Prize (2016); Malmö Konsthall (2016); Museum Ludwig, Cologne (2016); Kunsthaus Bregenz (2015); 56th Venice Biennale (2015); kestnergesellschaft Hannover (2014); Mudam - Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Luxembourg (2014); Kunsthaus Graz (2013); Palacio de Velázquez/Museo Rei-na Sofía, Madrid (2012); Kunsthalle Zürich (2011); Austrian Frederick Kiesler Prize for Architecture and the Arts (2010); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2009); CAPC, Borde-aux (2009); Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Lissabon (2009); Tate St. Ives, Cornwall (2008).

Curated by Karola Kraus

Press contact

Katharina Murschetz T +43 1 52500-1400 katharina.murschetz@mumok.at

Katja KulidzhanovaT +43 1 52500-1450katja.kulidzhanova@mumok.at

Fax +43 1 52500-1300press@mumok.at www.mumok.at

mumok – Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig WienMuseumsplatz 1, 1070 Vienna

Kapsch Contemporary Art Prize 2020

mumok — Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien and the Kapsch Group are awarding the Kapsch Contemporary Art Prize in 2020 for the fifth time, in the scope of the Kapsch Contemporary Art Challenge. The Kapsch Contemporary Art Prize promotes young fine artists whose main residence is in Austria. This prize presents young talents who have excelled in their art to an international audience for the first time.

Awarding the Prize The mumok’s director and the Kapsch Group invite experts to nominate artists for the Kapsch Contemporary Art Prize. These artists must have their main residence in Austria. Their works can come from all fields of the fine arts. The nominees are invited to submit applications to mumok in 2019. An international jury chaired by mumok director Karola Kraus and Georg Kapsch, CEO of the Kapsch Group, selects the winner in spring 2020.

About the Prize The prize includes 10,000 euro prize money and a solo exhibition at mumok from October 2020, with an accompanying publication. A work or group of works by the winner is also purchased by the Kapsch Group for the mumok collection.

Former Prizewinners Anna-Sophie Berger (2016), Julian Turner (2017), Ute Müller (2018) and Anita Leisz (2019)

Exhibition duration:October 2020 to February 2021