The turbulent biography of Elisabeth Wild (née Pollak, * 1922 in Vienna, † 2020 in Panajachel, Guatemala) reads like a recap of the twentieth century. Marked by flight and displacement, national identification and disidentification, her life seemed constantly to hit the reset button. This is not least evident in her oeuvre, which is...

Benoît Piéron’s artistic practice is informed by his lifelong experience with illness and a childhood largely spent in hospitals. In his work, he addresses the medical and social treatment of sick bodies, experiences of waiting and uncertainty, care and intimacy. When, for instance, he patchworks recycled hospital bedsheets to make...

Sam Gilliam, who recently passed away (1933–2022), is seen as an important innovator in postwar painting in the USA. He was greatly influenced by the Washington Color School and in 1972 he participated in the group exhibition curated by Walter Hopps for the US pavilion at the Venice Biennale. He was the first Black artist to represent...

The mumok collection contains nearly five hundred works related to animals—a considerable quantity that raises the question of what kind of zoo the museum in fact is. What is kept, researched, and displayed both here and there to protect “wild life” and the “freedom of art”? And in whose interest?

The Animal Within...

Each year, the Vordemberge-Gildewart Foundation awards a grant worth 60,000 Swiss francs (about 58,000 euros) to support an artist under the age of 35. The Vordemberge-Gildewart Award is thus the highest-paying award for young talent in Europe. In line with the philosophy of Friedrich Vordemberge-Gildewart, the prize money is not...

Departing from the focuses of the mumok collections on the avant-garde of the 1960s and 1970s as well as conceptual and socio-analytic approaches in contemporary art, the exhibition Collaborations examines diverse strategies of collective authorship. The exhibition builds a bridge spanning from the smallest to the largest...

In her exhibition Nane Oda Lavutaris / Who Will Play for Me?, the artist Emília Rigová, born in Slovakia, explores the history and the present-day experiences of the Roma. In an installation with pianos she refers to the musical heritage of the Roma and the tensions between self-image and external perception that...

The exhibition explores the various theatrical and stage-related forms of expression in art since the 1960s, when a neo-avant-garde critical of tradition began focusing on performative and Actionist art forms that endowed artists with a stage-like presence, often in front of an audience. Among these were the Orgies Mysteries Theater—a...

In 2023, mumok will present New York artist Adam Pendleton’s first comprehensive solo exhibition in Europe. Pendleton’s painting is a continuous index in which gestures are recorded, transposed, and overwritten. Since 2008 he has articulated much of his work through the idea of Black Dada, an ever-evolving inquiry into the...

The exhibition mixed up with others before we even begin investigates models of thinking and working that reconcile different, sometimes contradictory entities within contemporary visual culture. Current artistic positions enter into a dialogue with selected works from the mumok collection and objects from the collections of...

Agnes Fuchs employs painting, videos, and installations as means to reconfigure the scientific and technological instruments and processes that paved the way for contemporary digital technologies. Operating instructions, functional descriptions, and manuals for oscilloscopes, computers, power supply units, or measuring devices serve...

The exhibition Avant-Garde and Liberation highlights the significance of global modernism for contemporary art. It raises questions of the political circumstances that move contemporary artists to resort to those non-European avant-gardes that formed as a counterpart of the dominant Western modernism from the 1920s to the...