Reading Time in Space - Modernism at mumok 1910 to 1955

OPEN WED-SUN, 10:00-18:00

The phenomenon of modernism can be understood as a process of radical change in all fields of art. The years around 1910 not only witnessed the great leap into abstraction; there were also numerous further parallel and very heterogeneous developments. Especially film, which can directly show the phenomena of simultaneity and montage as the experience of modern life, contributed to the establishment of new ways of thinking and new categories of perception. The experiments of avant-garde artists like László Moholy-Nagy, Hans Richter, Fernand Léger, and Marcel Duchamp were key influences on a fundamental reorientation of the classical media. In the linkage of the old with the new media, in particular photography assumed a new role of mediating between aesthetic and documentary competence, making the complexity of modernism very clear with works on the big questions of architecture and urban life, design, landscape and portrait.

Our newest presentation of our classical modernism collection is a new thematic exhibition covering works from expressionism to the 1950s. Taking striking artists and theorists and key places like the Bauhaus as a starting point, the order of the White Cube is discontinued in favor of a new way of thinking in fragments and montage.

Curated by Susanne Neuburger