Of all the pioneering art movements of the 1960s, Op art and kinetic art seem to have been accorded the least recognition. Often they were depreciatingly seen as too spectacular and thus superficial. Wrongly so, since Op art and kinetic art sharpen our awareness of the ambiguous nature of reality. They quite literally show us that...

Ornament as promise. This could have been a motto for the Pattern and Decoration movement, formed in the mid-1970s in the USA. In this exhibition, with its reference to Adolf Loos’s assertion concerning “ornament and crime,” mumok presents the rich collection of works from this movement of Peter and Irene Ludwig, in the largest...

Christian Kosmas Mayer’s cross-media works and installations are based on detailed research into history and contemporary society. This is undertaken in order to critically reevaluate history and the present by placing evolutionary and natural phenomena into the framework of cultural history and science. Mayer’s work focuses on...

Ute Müller creates installations that place paintings, objects, and architecture into a dynamic interplay, breaking away from stale concepts of the work of art and forms of perception. Walls and plinths are removed from their usual architectural functions as frames and backdrops, themselves becoming motifs that shape both work and its...

mumok is showing the first comprehensive retrospective exhibition of the work of Austrian artist Ernst Caramelle (born 1952 in Hall in Tirol). This exhibition includes all the phases of the artist’s work from 1974 to today. Various media and Caramelle’s conceptual approach will be interlinked and illustrated in an accessible way, but...

The Neoavantgarde of the 1960s and 1970s is characterized by its radical breaks with tradition, by redefinitions of creative approaches and artistic media. The emergence of media-based art and the link between the theory and practice of art, in turn, led to innovative forms of painting. The general tendency to abandon figurative, or...

For her exhibition in mumok, Small Habit Revolution, artist and filmmaker Loretta Fahrenholz has created two new pieces that address key feminist works of the 1940s and their transfer into various Internet formats.
Story in Reverse is a multi-part slide installation based on Ilse Aichinger’s Mirror Story...

The exhibition Film and More. From the Archives of Kurt Kren and Ernst Schmidt jr. is devoted to two highly influential filmmakers of the Austrian postwar avantgarde and sheds light on trends in art and film in the 1960s and 1970s.
The papers of Ernst Schmidt jr. (1938–1988) were given as a gift to mumok in 2015, and in...

The exhibition Photo/Politics/Austria embarks on a photographic journey through the past one hundred years of Austrian history, using single images and image series that put unique events, historical upheaval, and sociopolitical shifts in a nutshell. Simultaneously, it traces the evolution of photography and the diversity of...

Since the foundation of the mumok collection in 1959 the museum has brought together around 10,000 works by around 1,600 artists. 55 Dates invites you to encounter 55 of these works—in the form of “blind dates” with art.

A first encounter and a visual impression is available by means of the book 55 Dates, which...

mumok is showing the first comprehensive retrospective exhibition of the work of Austrian artist Ernst Caramelle. This exhibition includes all the phases of the artist’s work from 1974 to today. Various media and Caramelle’s conceptual approach will be interlinked and illustrated in an accessible way, but without losing the work’s...

Gaby and Wilhelm Schürmann do not see their collection as just private property or a prestige object, but rather as an item of cultural value that needs exchange with the public. Their collection has been constantly growing since the late 1970s, and it provides an incomparable view of the development of contemporary art from the 1980s...