Hans Schabus‘s Cafe Hansi is an independent and functional spatial work of art within the architecture of the mumok building. It is open to visitors every last Thursday of every month from 6 to 9 pm. The idea is to spend some time there, leaving the sober space of the museum behind. When entering this café you walk into a...

This exhibition is devoted to the photographic legacy of Heimrad Bäcker, which was given to mumok as a gift in 2015. It includes more than 14,000 items and is a witness to Bäcker’s lifelong critical inquiry of the Holocaust. The exhibition presents a selection of photographs, notes, texts, and found items.
Bäcker began to...

With Siegfried Zaworka, mumok has for the first time invited an Austrian artist to fill the wall in the museum’s foyer with a site-specific work. Following photography-based installations by Cindy Sherman, Louise Lawler, and Jeff Wall, Zaworka focuses his artistic investigation on the devices used in pain- ting. Under the title ...

When Alfred Schmeller became the second director of the 20er Haus (today’s mumok) in 1969, he had already enjoyed a long and varied career. He had been influential in the Art Club, and had worked for many years as a critic. Alongside his extensive collecting and exhibition activities, Schmeller was one of the first directors to...

Anita Leisz (born 1973 in Leoben) is the fourth prizewinner of the Kapsch Contemporary Art Prize, which promotes young artists who are based primarily in Austria.
Her minimal artistic practice cannot be reduced to a clearly defined medium or singular reading, nor to any specific, spatial situation, and this is what makes her work...

Objects Recognized in Flashes is the title of a group exhibition focusing on surfaces of photographs, products, and bodies. The exhibition was developed by the curator in consultation with the artists Michele Abeles, Annette Kelm, Josephine Pryde, and Eileen Quinlan. It asks how our largely mediatized society deals with and...

“Crazy like machine forms larger and bolder.” This is how Eva Hesse described a group of finished drawings in 1965 in a letter to her artist friend Sol LeWitt. The idea of “bold forms” can be applied to the artist’s entire oeuvre of drawings, to which mumok is devoting this exhibition. On view is a selection of works on paper from the...

Is modernism an epoch? How did artists see this in the 1920s? Reading Time in Space answers these questions by referring to four exhibitions and book projects that constituted the first global presentations of modernism and raised key questions in their own time. These projects rested on new concepts of space and time. They...

The slide and audio installation Lapsus Exposure addresses communication, subjectivity, and the use of media. A key question concerns the significance of the chosen medium for our understanding of what we see. In his large slide projection, Irish artist James Coleman shows a studio situation that seems to be prepared for...