calendario eventi  :: 

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18/10/2006

Two exhibitions

Museum Moderner Kunst MUMOK, Wien

Erwin Wurm: Keep a Cool Head / Franz Gertsch Retrospective. Paintings 1951 - 1984

Curator of the exhibition Edelbert Kob

Erwin Wurm

Keep a Cool Head

In a permanent exchange of questions and answers about what sculpture is and how it is constituted, Erwin Wurm has worked for more than twenty five years on a many layered body of work that can be understood as a long term study of sculpture as a concept. For Wurm, one of the most successful contemporary artists, anything can become sculpture: actions, written or drawn instructions, or even a thought. His art often treats elementary as well as banal life needs and actions, as well as their perversion, as can be expressed in physical deformations. The artist explores issues such as the thinness craze and obesity, fashion, advertising, the cult of consumerism, whose central fetishes include the private home as well the car. The exhibition shows with more than 400 drawings, videos, photographs, and sculptures, the most expansive show of the artist's work to date.

His most recent prominent work, visible from afar, is the object "House Attack", installed on MUMOK's external facade: the single family house as a symbol of the everyday, privacy, as well as small-mindedness explodes like a bomb into the facade of the museum — the institutionalized museum temple. In its visual presence "House Attack" represents an ambivalent metaphorics exemplary for the current work of the artist, a focus of the exhibition.

House Attack by Erwin Wurm
The Installation was realized with the help of Strabag, Felbermayr and KNAUF.

In a spectacular event marking the opening of the exhibition Erwin Wurm. Keep A Cool Head, on 18 October, 2006 "House Attack"— a single-family house — was heaved onto the roof of MUMOK. "House Attack" will be on view for the duration of the exhibition.

The idea for "House Attack" emerged while planning the MUMOK retrospective. "House Attack" is a single-family house that crashes into the roof of the museum, a house like one that might be built at Blaue Laguene (Blue Lagoon), a prefab housing development in southern Vienna. A symbol for conservative, small-minded longings, the single-family house collides into the museum as an temple to the muses, and the museum itself now also becomes part of the sculpture. "House Attack"confuses our perception of art and everyday reality and in its striking appearance and humorous, dramatic staging of the banal is a perfect example of current developments in the artist's work.

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Franz Gertsch

Retrospective - Paintings 1951 - 1984

With his large format portraits of artists and others from the underground from the post-hippie years, including the rock legend Patti Smith, Franz Gertsch was already a sensation in the 1970s. In subsequent years, the individual persons and temporal references successively disappeared from his pictures, and he developed a classical, auratic style of portraiture. The portrait becomes a monumental icon. Based on photographs and slides, Gertsch created a work unique in its details and expression, possessing on the one hand a lyric-poetic dimension beyond a merely documentary-realistic depiction, and presenting painting in the age of the new media in a new light. As the most important European representative of photorealism, he has today again become an important figure for a generation of younger painters. The exhibition will take place in collaboration with Museum Franz Gertsch in Burgdorf and Vienna's Albertina. MUMOK will show the painterly work from 1951 to 1984, while the Albertina will focus on Gertsch's monumental woodprints that have emerged since the 1980s.

Image: Erwin Wurm, House Attack

Opening: 19 October, 2006 - 7.00 p.m.

Sponsors of the exhibition:
Strabag, Felbermayr, KNAUF, Foto Leutner Fachlabor, Monat der Fotografie, Weingut Brundlmayer
Mediapartner Der Standard, O1, Vormagazin

Partner:
Telekom Austria, Dorotheum, Uniqa, Wittmann

Press contact:
DI.FH Eva Engelberger Phone+43-1-52500-1400 Fax +43-1-52500-1300 press@mumok.at

MUMOK
MuseumsQuartier Museumsplatz 1 - Wien
Opening hours: Tue-Sun: 10.00 a.m.-­6.00 p.m. Thu: 10.00 a.m.-­9.00 p.m

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