Contemporary Art

What could the primarily Western collection of the Nationalgalerie look like today if a global understanding of art had informed its development? Looking at artworks from non-European centres of Modernism and their activities, untold stories and overlooked connections are picked up and developed.

The inimitable fashions of Stephan Hann are produced from everyday materials like pages of telephone directories, Tetra-Pak cartons and plastic carrier bags. These materials are transformed by the artist’s hand into clothes which fascinate us immediately. At the same time his poetic creations provide us with food for thought.

Before Projection: Video Sculpture 1974–1995 shines a spotlight on a body of work in the history of video art that has been largely overlooked since its inception. The exhibition explores connections between our current moment and the point at which video art was transformed dramatically by the entry of large-scale, cinematic installation into the gallery space. It presents a reevaluation of monitor-based sculpture since the 1970s and serves as a ...

Uta Reinhardt’s pictorial creations invite a wide range of interpretations. Human and animal chimeras encounter each other as in an alliance and create their own unique world. The scenic compositions seduce us with their lively colours and the light recorded with dynamic brushstrokes.

This publication documents Ursula von Rydingsvard’s exhibition at The Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia, which features a large new leather work produced with the museum’s studio. The survey — guest curated by Mark Rosenthal — largely focuses on her artistic development since 2000 and reveals her predilection for emotionally-charged, visceral art that is handwrought, richly complex, and monumentally scaled.

Fully integrated into the nature of the Corinthian countryside, the Museum Liaunig is at once restrained and spectacular. An outstanding example of contemporary museum architecture, it creates spaces for the Liaunig collections whose focus is on Austrian art from the post-war era to the present.

In decades of artistic production Gerhard Berger (born in 1933) has arrived at a unique, characteristic visual language. His representation of humans, oscillating between figurative and abstract painting, is rooted in the great myths of humankind and in the religious visual conceptions of the world’s cultures.  

John Ruskin was an influential English art critic and social thinker of the Victorian era, who famously argued that the principal concern of the artist is “truth to nature.” For Ruskin, this truth entailed more than merely adept technical representation: artists should, in fact, depict the natural world as mankind experiences it, with all the sensations of both beauty and terror it elicits.  

Since the 1960s, Joan Jonas (b. 1936 in New York) has been one of the pioneers of performance art. She was part of the New York art scene that included Richard Serra, Gordon Matta-Clark, John Cage, Philipp Glass, and Merce Cunningham. Her experimental installations involve projections, video, drawings, ambient sound, props, and masks. Based on a number of interviews, the volume provides insights into her artistic oeuvre.

Muslims, Christians and Jews have a great deal in common. In his new large-format oilstick drawings Eran Shakine shows them appearing together as an indistinguishable trio in actions that are both profound and humorous. He thus reveals both the diversity and the similarity of the three and shows his own highly individual view of these three world religions.