The Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien (MUMOK) ~ The Largest Museum for Modern & Contemporary Art in Vienna ~ Is Toured By AKN Editor

Written by James Matthew Wednesday, 28 March 2012 22:12

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). The foundation of the museum in its current form was laid when the Ludwig Foundation was created in 1981, about half of the art collection owned by Peter and Irene Ludwig was transferred to the new foundation, augmented by a further, large donation in 1991. The need for space to display these works ultimately led the foundation to absorb the old Museum of the 20th Century and move to a larger site. Since 2001, it has been housed in a futuristic cube designed by architects Ortner & Ortner, right in the heart of Vienna's famous 'Museumsquartier' providing 4,950 square meters of exhibition space for the main works of the collection of modern and contemporary art. The building appears as a dark, closed block, its roof curving down low on the edges. It is monolithically clad in anthracite grey basalt lava on the façades and roof surfaces: thus it is clearly set apart from its surroundings and seems to emerge from the ground as though rising from the deep. The museum’s collection is displayed on three levels of exhibition space in a series of presentations which change every year. A ten-meter wide outdoor stairway leads to the entrance plateau four meters above the courtyard level. Inside, a hall lit from above divides all of the levels into two differently proportioned groups of rooms. The entrance is on the third of the five levels, with two main exhibition levels above and two below. On one side of the access hall, five 5-meter-high, pillar-free exhibition areas measuring about 700 square meters each are stacked above each other. These areas can be flexibly subdivided. On the other side, there are more intimate rooms measuring 250 square meters each. Here the ceilings are 3.50 meters high. The various levels are connected by footbridges. The upper exhibition hall receives natural light through a large opening in the curved ceiling. The other slit-like openings and the panorama window in the uppermost floor give visitors a view to the outside and help provide a sense of orientation. The museum aims to preserve, enlarge, analyze, and make available to the public its collection of artworks from the 20th and 21st centuries, by serving as collection site, archive, research institution, and exhibition venue. A key concern is to contribute to the debate on contemporary art, and for this reason the Museum organizes events and discussions designed to raise awareness for new and experimental art, as well as to convey information on recent art history and theory. Visit the museum's website at : http://www.mumok.at

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 (including Yoko Ono's 'to Hammer a Nail', which, depending on source, may have been the work that introduced her to John Lennon). 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.

The MUMOK is currently showing Hyper Real: The Passion of the Real in Painting and Photography (until13 February 2011). Focussing on photo realism, Super Realism, Radical Realism, New Realism, and Hyper Realism, this exhibition explores, through approximately 250 works, this important chapter in international art history. At the end of the 1960s in the USA a group of painters stepped out of the shadows of Abstract Expressionism and turned towards the tradition of painterly realism. However, in doing so they also exaggerated the illusionism that had been handed down from the 1920s and 1930s. These painters translated unspectacular templates such as snapshots, amateur photos and newspaper clippings, often using slide projections, into large-format images, the photographic image was used either as a verbatim model or it could be ‘corrected’ as Chuck Close did in his portraits by placing different photos next to each other in order to give each segment of the picture its own focal point and, in a complex work process, turning photography into painting. Starting from the MUMOK’s own extensive collection of 40 works, the exhibition places the museum’s holdings in the context of the realisms and investigates the concepts behind a painting genre that addresses the subject matter of city, streets, automobiles and the American way of life through works by Richard Estes, Ralph Goings, Robert Bechtle, Malcolm Morley, Chuck Close, Don Eddy and Tom Wesselmann. Besides the focus on America, European artists like Gerhard Richter, Domenico Gnoli, Olivier Jean and Richard Hamilton are represented to show the rapid spread of realistic tendencies. Time and again the Photorealists emphasised the importance of Pop Art to their work and some of this is shown at the start of the exhibition before the presentation of the main protagonists such as Richard Estes, Ralph Goings or Don Eddy. The interaction between painting and photography is also shown through the presence of important international works by Jeff Wall, Candida Höfer, Andreas Gursky, Thomas Ruff and Thomas Struth.