MUMOK to Show Groundbreaking Early Works by Claes Oldenburg

Written by Francis Westmorland Thursday, 02 February 2012 03:18

Vienna, Austria.- The Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien (MUMOK) is proud to present "Claes Oldenburg: The Sixties", on view at the museum from February 2nd through May 28th 2012. With his humorous depictions of everyday objects, Claes Oldenburg is one of the most important and popular artists since the late 1950s. He is not only a main proponent of pop art, performance art and installation art, but also and in collaboration with Coosje van Bruggen has produced monumental "Large Scale Projects" in numerous cities around the world. Claes Oldenburg (born in 1929, Stockholm, Sweden) has not only been a major artist in Pop Art, Performance Art and Installation Art but, in partnership with Coosje van Bruggen, also a strong influence on art in public spaces with his monumental Large Scale Projects in numerous major cities worldwide.

With his humorous and profound depictions of everyday objects he is one of the most important and admired artists since the late 1950s. One central point of reference in Oldenburg’s oeuvre is the industrially produced object—the object as a commodity which, in ever-new metamorphoses of media and form, becomes a conveyor of culture and a symbol of the imagination, desires, and obsessions of the modern world. Organized by the MUMOK, this is the largest show ever of Oldenburg’s ground-breaking and emblematic early work of the 1960s. Numerous icons of Pop art will be seen in the exhibition, beginning with the installation The Street and its graffiti-inspired depictions of modern life in the big city and continuing to the famous consumer articles of The Store to the spectacular everyday objects of the modern Home: telephone, toilet bowl, bathtub, fan, saw, and light switch. Another chapter is dedicated to Oldenburg’s first designs for the colossal monuments of his consumer objects for public spaces. The exhibition concludes with mumok’s Mouse Museum a walk-in miniature museum in the form of a Geometric Mouse, for which Oldenburg collected 385 objects. With its souvenirs, kitsch objects, and studio models, the Mouse Museum demonstrates the incredible cultural variety—and mysteriousness—of capitalist society. With its reduction to abstract basic figures of formal invention, the Geometric Mouse, a central motif within the artist’s oeuvre, represents a dovetailing of high art and popular culture. It also functions as Oldenburg’s alter ego.


The MUMOK (Museum für Moderne Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien) is Austria's largest and most significant museum for contemporary art. First opened in 1962 as the Museum of the 20th Century in the Schweizergarten park, the MUMOK is now at its third address and with its third name (regularly moving to accommodate its expanding collection). MUMOK’s commitment to both history and the present and its museological, scientific and educational mission demands its profound engagement in the collection, research and communication of international artworks of modernism, the recent past, and the the present. With its emphasis on Pop Art and Photorealism, taken from the Austrian Ludwig Foundation, Fluxus and Nouveau Réalisme, taken from the Hahn Collection, and Viennese Actionism, MUMOK offers a unique blend of art focusing on society and reality as well as of performative art of the 20th century. MUMOK communicates the social relevance of art by illustrating the changes in art perception and their causes, both historical and contemporary. With reference to the present, MUMOK participates in the socio-political discourse and opposes tendencies which challenge the freedom of art and cultural policy. The collection spans from the Cubist, Futurist, and Surrealist works of classical modernism to Pop Art, Fluxus, and Nouveau Realism from the 1960s and 1970s. The early 20th century is represented with paintings and sculptures by masters Like Henri Matisse, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Pablo Picasso and Alberto Giacometti.

The collection includes important works of Pop Art by Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein as well as definitive examples of Fluxus, and conceptual art, In recent years, the collection has been expanded with present-day film, video, photo and graphic art. In total, the MUMOK collection contains around 9,700 works: paintings, sculptures, installations, drawings, graphic works, photos, videos, films, architectural models and furniture from the first half of the 20th century. The collection of Classic Modernism contains the most important movements and artists of the heroic years of modernism right up to the abstract and expressive tendencies of the post World War II period. Expressionism (Richard Gerstl, Oskar Kokoschka, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff), Cubism and Futurism (Henri Laurens, Giacomo Balla), constructive tendencies, Bauhaus (Piet Mondrian, Paul Klee) are represented as are important works from the areas of Dada and Surrealism (Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia, Max Ernst, René Magritte). Amongst the pioneering works of modernism to be found are André Derain’s Cowering Figure and František Kupka’s Nocturne, two of the earliest examples of conscious abstraction. The great ‘lone warriors’ who were committed to the human figure such as Pablo Picasso, Alberto Giacometti and Francis Bacon are represented with outstanding works and form an antipole to the abstractionists of the 50’s (Jackson Pollock, Ad Reinhardt, Morris Louis, Lucio Fontana, Piero Manzoni). Nouveau Réalisme is one of the focal points of the Hahn collection which was acquired by MUMOK in 1978, and the collection includes important works by Arman, François Dufrêne, Raymond Hains, Yves Klein, Martial Raysse, Daniel Spoerri, Jean Tinguely and Jacques de la Villeglé. César, Mimmo Rotella, Georg Baselitz, Niki de Saint-Phalle, Gérard Deschamps and Christo. Equally important in the collection are works from the Fluxus movement. Alongside numerous important works of Viennese Actionism the museum also holds extensive documentation in the MUMOK’s archive of actionism. A younger generation of artists is showcased in the 'MUMOKFactory', a separate exhibition space with a cinema, where the emphasis is on experimental media and performance art and several exhibition levels are used for special exhibitions. Visit the museum's website at ... http://www.mumok.at

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