55 Dates. Highlights of the mumok Collection

Since the foundation of the mumok collection in 1959 the museum has brought together around 10.000 works by around 1.600 artists. 55 Dates invites you to encounter 55 of these works—in the form of “blind dates” with art.

A first encounter and a visual impression is available by means of the book 55 Dates, which aims to be an exhibition in book form. The more physical experience resting on the relationship between object and viewer in the gallery only comes later. This is a radical reversal of the traditional order of things, as here we are not developing a catalogue to accompany an exhibition, but rather an exhibition that derives from a catalogue.

55 Dates - catalogue
55 Dates is no typical collection catalogue, since the objects are presented by Jakob Lena Knebl in her own expressive and sensual way that playfully transforms our pleasures in seeing and exploring and in physical encounter. The works are removed from their specific art-historical anchors and no longer seen as documentary illustrations of a collecting history, but rather as auratic objects with very individual power.

55 Dates - exhitibion
55 Dates is also a collection exhibition that takes our encounter with the objects out of the two-dimensionality of a book and into the exhibition gallery, making a paper universe a three-dimensional reality. Here we present artworks not along the lines of the traditional gaze but as a diverse simultaneity of ways of thinking, themes, and artistic media. The selection of works ranges from Paul Klee, Giacomo Balla, and Pablo Picasso to Andy Warhol, and brings together in one space such different approaches as Anna Artaker, Cosima von Bonin, Günter Brus, Friedl Dicker, VALIE EXPORT, Marta Hoepffner, Ed Paschke, and many more.

55 Dates presents a mix of individual preferences and interests, of the well and the lesser known, showing works by artists that have entered into art history and by others who are still to be discovered. Both the publication and the exhibition highlight that art history is not an objective narrative but rather directed and influenced by its protagonists. Neither book nor exhibition can depict the entirety of the mumok collection, and nor do they correspond to conventional expectations of a representative overview or collection of art of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

The exhibition architecture is designed by Austrian artist Hans Schabus, whose Cafe Hansi stands directly by the exhibition entrance. This walk-in sculpture, now at mumok for several months, represents a successful combination of art and communication. Schabus’s design for the presentation of 55 Dates is an open grid that draws on the concept of the encounter and is laid over the exhibition like a net with many different points of reference. Visitors to this exhibition are caught up in a net of 55 (and more) works exploring modernist and contemporary art, selected from a larger number of options.

In the course of the changing institutional history of mumok, the focus of the museum and its collection has shifted several times. In the early years the aim was to document the period from classical modernism to art after World War II in a representative collection—a Herculean task. In 1979, the establishment of the Austrian Ludwig Foundation and the acquisition of the Wolfgang Hahn Collection added performative and socially relevant art of the 1960s and 1970s to the collection. Since the turn of the century, the museum has become a center of competence for Vienna Actionism and has also provided a justified place for works by women artists, in particular in our collections of contemporary art and including acquisitions of works of photography, video and film, and painting, sculpture and installations.

This project will allow readers and visitors to “date” 55 works chosen from a large number of options.

Artists: Anna Artaker, Giacomo Balla, Joseph Beuys, Günter Brus, André Cadere, John De Andrea, Robert Delaunay, André Derain, Friedl Dicker, VALIE EXPORT, Richard Gerstl, Albert Gleizes, Ralph Goings, Haus-Rucker-Co. (Günter Zamp Kelp, Laurids Ortner, Klaus Pinter), Marta Hoepffner, Johannes Itten, Jasper Johns,
Allan Kaprow, Paul Klee, Oskar Kokoschka, František Kupka, Yayoi Kusama,
Maria Lassnig, Louise Lawler, Ree Morton, museum in progress, Bruce Nauman, Henrik Olesen, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, Gina Pane, Pino Pascali, Ed Paschke, Pablo Picasso, Charlotte Posenenske, Robert Rauschenberg, Dieter Roth,
Niki de Saint Phalle, Paul Sarkisian, Alfons Schilling, Ashley Hans Scheirl,
Carolee Schneemann, Daniel Spoerri, Jean Tinguely, Cy Twombly, Marina Abramovic and Ulay, Andy Warhol, Franz West, Wiener Gruppe (Franz J. Hubmann,
Friedrich Achleitner, Konrad Bayer, Gerhard Rühm, Oswald Wiener),
Cosima von Bonin, Heimo Zobernig

Curated by Susanne Neuburger and Jörg Wolfert