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Hugo Canoilas, Kapsch Contemporary Art Prize winner 2020, uses the tradition and history of painting and object art to redefine and expand the connection between installational and performative strategies. Along with art history, he also references sociopolitical developments and the philosophical and art-theoretical discourses it involves. Currently, the all-dominating coronavirus crisis is already bringing into sharper focus virulent and interconnected topics such as the climate crisis, environmental degradation, and the ever-widening gap between poor and rich countries.Canoilas’s work deals with these developments and the anthropocentric worldview on which they are based. It ties in with ideas of a careful and egalitarian human treatment of nature and its creatures—ideas that have evolved in ongoing discourses around the Anthropocene and Posthumanism.

In January 2017 the collectors Gertraud and Dieter Bogner gave a very special gift to mumok—approximately thirty works by the Austrian-American architect, artist, stage designer, designer, and theorist Friedrich Kiesler.

Painting, along with sculpture, film, performance, and design, is a central component of the intermedia art of Heimo Zobernig. Since the beginning of his artistic practice in the early 1980s, the artist has built up a comprehensive painterly oeuvre, always based on his attempt to explore color like a “scientist.” Thus, in Zobernig’s work, painting has become a machine for the creation of insight. Characteristics of the artist’s method in this context are strategies of simplification, standardization, and systematization using predefined rules and the artistic appropriation of industrial norms and widespread samples (such as TV test patterns).

Ten years after joining the museum, Karola Kraus is organizing with her team a collection presentation that includes central donations and acquisitions from the past decade. The selected works range from classical modernism to the present day, following the path of the collection’s development. Twenty years after mumok opened in Vienna’s MuseumsQuartier, and forty years after the founding of the Austrian Ludwig Foundation, this exhibition is both a survey of the past and a glimpse ahead to the future. As the past years are reviewed, new perspectives are proposed as basis for the museum’s future collection and exhibition activities. The collection exhibition Enjoy sets out to convey the intertwining of past and present as a living process of continual reassessment and revaluation that reflects everchanging socio-political, socio-cultural, and philosophical developments and discourses. The main themes cut across time and media: the depiction of life in society, the human body, and nature, as well as migration and the drawing of boundaries.Curated by Karola Kraus with Manuela Ammer, Heike Eipeldauer, Rainer Fuchs, Naoko Kaltschmidt, Matthias Michalka