Eyes of a child of "Prostir RaDity“, detail of installation, photo: Oliver Ottenschlaeger

It took more than a decade to build the summer residence of Vienna’s most famous general, Prince Eugene of Savoy. In 1723, construction of the upper palace drew to a close and the Belvedere estate was finally completed. The 300th anniversary of this event presents the perfect occasion for the museum to reflect on its history. Both as a museum and a landmark building, the Belvedere has stood for power and prestige throughout the ages, serving as the setting for courtly festivities, at times as a royal residence, and as the venue for the signing of the Austrian State Treaty in 1955. In an extensive exhibition, the museum will examine the building’s changing roles.

Curated by Björn Blauensteiner, Sabine Grabner, Kerstin Jesse (Contributed to the concept), Alexander Klee, Georg Lechner, Stefan Lehner, Monika Mayer and Luisa Ziaja.

Moderne Galerie 1903 [Bildarchiv BA6] © Belvedere, Wien

Zemi belt, Taino, Greater Antilles, 1520–1560, snail shells, teeth, cotton, obsidian, brass, glass mirror, Ambras Collection, Weltmuseum Wien © KHM-Mu

The exhibition ON STAGE explores the various theatrical and stage-related forms of expression in art since the 1960s, when a neo-avant-garde critical of tradition began focusing on performative and actionist art forms that endowed artists with a stage-like presence, often in front of an audience. The Viennese Actionism with its provocative and time-critical theatricality is just as much a part of this as the Vienna Group, whose literary cabaret stands firmly in the tradition of Dadaist theater, or the Fluxus-Movement with its media crossovers. Alongside these maledominated art forms, a feminist scene established itself that portrayed and challenged the effects of patriarchal social hierarchies on gender roles. They form the historical basis for more recent positions that oppose conservatively determined gender roles and images of identity, as well as racism and colonialism. Other thematic areas include musical and cinematic productions, (self-)representations and rituals of the art business as well as works in which viewers become actors. The exhibition shows 150 works and work series, most of which are culled from the holdings of the mumok collection.

Cindy Sherman, Untitled

With the highlight exhibition Science Fiction(s), the Weltmuseum Wien presents speculative narratives for the future. With installations, paintings and films, the show looks at various ideas of the future.

How do we shape a future worth living with and for all? Science Fiction(s) presents voices that are often excluded from Hollywood’s narratives about the future. Works by around twenty contemporary artists highlight different strategies for using science fiction as a tool for critiquing the present, creating alternative futures, healing and decolonisation. The science fiction film architects KAWA (current film: Rubikon) have created an exciting architectural environment in which the paintings, installations, museum objects, films, and games present the visions of artists and activists and invite visitors to immerse themselves in these different worlds.

Cara Romero, The Zenith, 2022, Photograph. Printed by the artist on Legacy Platine paper © Cara Romero

mumok presents New York artist Adam Pendleton’s first comprehensive solo exhibition in Europe. Pendleton’s painting is a continuous index in which gestures are recorded, transposed, and overwritten. Since 2008 he has articulated much of his work through the idea of Black Dada, an ever-evolving inquiry into the relationship between Blackness, abstraction, and the avant-garde. In his paintings, drawings, and other works, a visual philosophy of incomplete postulates emerges, flattening the distinctions between legibility and abstraction, past and present, familiar and strange.

Installation view, Adam Pendleton, Blackness, White and Light, Foto: Klaus Pichler ©mumok

The comprehensive, international group exhibition No Feeling Is Final. The Skopje Solidarity Collection revolves around the Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA) Skopje’s unusual collection of modern works, as well as the historical and political context of this extraordinary project.

After the massive earthquake that hit Skopje (then Yugoslavia) in 1963, there was a huge effort to help rebuild the devastated city, as a large-scale gesture of international solidarity. The decision was made to establish a museum of contemporary art as a key cultural element of the reconstruction, and thousands of works were donated to Skopje by artists from around the world.

The collection of MoCA Skopje represents both a time capsule of international art at a moment when modernism was still in its prime and a rare artistic encounter across the Cold War divide between East and West: it includes many artworks by predominantly white and male figures who will be well recognizable to an art-loving public, but it also goes beyond the established canon of modernism and incorporates often fascinating works by artists who hail from the former Eastern bloc, as well as from the Global South.

Installation view: No Feeling Is Final. The Skopje Solidarity Collection, Kunsthalle Wien 2023, photo: www.kunst-dokumentation.com

The turbulent biography of Elisabeth Wild (née Pollak, * 1922 in Vienna, † 2020 in Panajachel, Guatemala) reads like a recap of the twentieth century. Marked by flight and displacement, national identification and disidentification, her life seemed constantly to hit the reset button. This is not least evident in her oeuvre, which is highly diverse in terms of the media she used—including painting, sculpture, and textile design as well as collages and subsequent installations. mumok presents her first retrospective exhibition, turning the spotlight on her late works as well as her previously unknown early works.

With her first major presentation in Vienna, Wild’s story comes full circle. At the heart of the conceived exhibition is her artistic development, which reads like a ride through twentieth- and twenty-first-century art history. Early and late works are juxtaposed on two of mumok’s exhibition levels. Though the two creative periods seem contrary at first glance—one might assume they are not from the same artist—a closer inspection reveals kinships that bespeak the artist’s early interests. Collaged works display architectural and scenic fragments as well as masklike traits or geometric patterns. The collages thus combine Wild’s early landscapes, portraits, and textile designs in a purely abstract form.

Exhibition view: Elisabeth Wild. Fantasiefabrik, Photo: Klaus Pichler / mumok

Yoshitomo Nara (b. 1959) is one of the best-known artists of his generation worldwide. Since the 1990s, he has attracted international attention with his so-called “Angry Girls,” heavily stylized images of girls with grim expressions, vampire fangs, and knives in their hands. With their childlike cuteness, the figures recall the aesthetics of comics and cartoons, ranging from snotty brats to naïve, sweet-looking characters.

All My Little Words at the Albertina modern focuses on Nara’s multifaceted oeuvre of drawings, which developed over a period of some forty years and is presented here in a Petersburg hanging arranged by the artist himself. The exhibition ranges from early experimental works on paper and a number of paintings and sculptures to an expansive installation.

Yoshitomo Nara | Miss Margaret, 2016 | Private Collection, United States of America © Yoshitomo Nara | Foto: Yoshitomo Nara

The exhibition is dedicated to the conceptual artist Maximilian Prüfer (*1986). While raising questions about the role of nature in and as art, his artwork focuses on ecological, political, and sociocultural issues. The exhibition addresses two campaigns initiated by Mao Zedong (1893–1976) – the Four Pests Campaign of 1958 and Mao’s Gifts of 1968 – and discusses their effects in China. At the same time, it examines which questions the campaigns gave rise to in Austria, Europe, and around the world.

Honey Pictures (series), Maximilian Prüfer, Photo print on Baryta, 2022 © Maximilian Prüfer

This exhibition focusses on a central work of European sculpture: Francesco Laurana’s (c. 1430–1502) Female Bust at the Kunstkammer Wien.

It is one of the few Renaissance marble busts with colouring. The work is one of the most significant creations of fifteenth century portrait sculpture. This small but prestigiously appointed exhibition is set to rekindle public interest in the exceptional importance of this object, which has somewhat fallen into oblivion in the last decades. The exhibition will be the first to showcase a thesis formulated some time ago that this is a portrait of the mysterious Laura who was so deeply (but unhappily) beloved by the Italian Renaissance poet Petrarch. Petrarch wrote over three hundred touching poems for Laura in the fourteenth century.

Next to masterpieces from the Kunsthistorisches Museum like Giorgione’s painting Laura, the exhibition will feature international loans from the Frick Collection in New York and the Biblioteca Laurenziana in Florence.

©Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna

What is going on in local art scenes, studios, and alternative exhibition spaces? And how can one exhibition capture the diversity of the production and presentation of art?

Belvedere 21 already explored these questions with the 2019 show On the New. Young Scenes in Vienna, developing a dynamic, collaborative format that involved multiple contributors and a shared curatorial authorship. In addition to presenting eighteen individual artistic positions, twelve Viennese project spaces hosted rotating exhibitions within the show, each kicked off with a ‘midissage’ (midway opening) complemented by discursive events and performances.

In 2023, On the New. Viennese Scenes and Beyond picks up this thread and expands on the original concept. In order to provide a broader view of contemporary approaches, strategies, and discourses, the survey now also includes artists and project spaces from other parts of Austria. In an expanded dynamic, the show presents fourty-four artists and twenty-four exhibitions within the exhibition—curated by individual project spaces—and thus offers fresh perspectives on what art can be today, on its themes, aesthetics, and forms of expression, and how it is perceived.

This polyphonic tracing of the “new”–despite the ambivalence this term and its function imply especially in contemporary art–presents no grand overview, but rather, an image of a growing entity without beginning or end, in perpetual flux.

Photo: Johannes Stoll / Belvedere, Vienna

The Belvedere Art Award was established in 2022 to reflect forward-looking dynamics in society and contemporary art. The art award advances an inclusive, queer-feminist, future- and diversity-oriented approach in response to current discourses and the awareness of the many exclusions in the museum and exhibition fields, not the least of which is manifested in the awarding of prizes.

The biennal Belvedere Art Award is sponsored by Vendome Projects and was launched in cooperation with the Belvedere. Local and international experts determine the prize winner: in a two-stage selection process, each of the five nomination jury members identifies two emerging artists with a connection to Austria. A five-member selection jury then determines the winner of the award. Age, gender, and nationality do not play a role in the selection process.

The Belvedere Art Award is endowed with 20,000 euros. In addition to the prize money, the award winner receives a solo exhibition at the Belvedere 21 and an accompanying publication. An international jury selected Robert Gabris as the winner of the Belvedere Art Award 2022 on November 28.

Photo: Michal Blecha

The title of the exhibition Dots & Layers refers to the common denominators in the latest works by Andrea Bischof, Oliver Dorfer and Michael Kos. Dots and layers are at the same time stylistic devices and references to the working practice in their different artistic approaches. While Bischof’s works are dominated by colour spaces, Dorfer’s focus is on the narrative component. Kos, on the other hand, exploits the potential of diverse materials and their materiality. All the works presented are convincing in their subtlety and invite a view both from close up and from a distance.

The exhibition is part of the STRABAG Artlounge Special series, which presents long-standing artists from the STRABAG Artcollection. Andrea Bischof, Oliver Dorfer and Michael Kos are celebrating a milestone birthday this year and are represented with numerous works from many creative periods from the past three decades.

Details from works by Andrea Bischof, Michael Kos and Oliver Dorfer (f.l.t.r.)

Hans Hollein, the only Austrian to win the Pritzker Prize and a self-proclaimed avantgardist in the 1960s, was a meticulous curator of his own work throughout his life. At the same time, however, the reception of his work was often overshadowed by his personality. The exhibition „Hollein Calling. Architectural Dialogues” explores the Hollein phenomenon from today’s perspective. A dialogue with the positions of a younger generation of architects launches a reappraisal that brings Hollein’s work back into the current discourse.

In the exhibition, groundbreaking projects by Hans Hollein meet new buildings and projects by 15 European architectural offices* whose work is currently shaping the discourse. Visitors can resonate with alternating poles of agreement and dissonance. The objects from Hollein—sketches, models, prototypes, and documents—are all from the extremely extensive Archive Hans Hollein (Az W and MAK), which has been undergoing processing at the Az W for several years. In the exhibition “Hollein Calling. Architectural Dialogues” there is a juxtaposition with selected exhibits from the younger architectural offices. The focus of the dialogue is to convey the working methods and processes involved. The curators consciously decided against a linear and project-related reading. Instead, large tables create fields of associations where the objects meet along the lines of related themes, methods, and interests. Slide projections provide insights into Hans Hollein’s extensive archive of images. Many of the sources of the images shown here publicly for the first time provide new insights and access to alternative strands of thought and unrealized concepts for a previously ‘unknown’ Hollein. Again in dialogue with this, largeformat photographs convey the positions taken by the European architectural offices.

Hans Hollein: Retti Candle Shop, Kohlmarkt 8-10, 1010 Vienna, 1964-1965, Working model. © Hans Hollein Archive, Az W and MAK, Vienna

Discover Louise Bourgeois’s early paintings as part of the Belvedere’s three-hundred-year jubilee. In 2023 the Belvedere will dedicate a major solo exhibition to an artist who, like virtually no other, has shaped the art of today.

Presented in the Baroque galleries of the Lower Belvedere, Louise Bourgeois’s paintings from the 1940s will be placed in dialogue with a selection of sculptures, installations, drawings, and prints from all periods of her storied career. In an oeuvre which covered a wide range of formal and material experimentation, Bourgeois succeeded in expressing contradictory impulses and binary oppositions – figuration and abstraction, male and female, conscious and unconscious – within a single work. By the 1990s, she had won global renown for her artistic achievements, becoming famous for her monumental spider sculptures and room-sized Cells. But it was in her oil paintings made between 1938 and 1949 that the French-American artist first developed the formal vocabulary and defined the thematic concerns that she would continue to explore over the following six decades.

The exhibition represents the first time these paintings will be exhibited as a body of work in Europe, and it is the first major exhibition of Bourgeois’s work in Vienna in a generation.

Louise Bourgeois, ROOF SONG, 1947, Photo: Eeva Inkeri, © The Easton Foundation / Bildrecht, Vienna 2023

In the autumn of 2023, the Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna showcases a medium that played a central role in the public celebrations of princely power and magnificence during the Renaissance: monumental tapestries.

The most exquisite products fashioned from delicate silks and precious metal threads were produced in Brussels, including the series of tapestries depicting the story of the Apostles, commissioned by Pope Leo X (1475-1521) for the Sistine Chapel in Rome. The cartoons, which led to a stylistic revolution in Flemish tapestry design, are by the celebrated Italian artist Raffaele Santi (1483-1520). Taking Raphael’s designs as a starting point, the exhibition explores the evolution of the art of tapestries in the sixteenth century, and presents a selection of masterpieces from the Kunsthistorisches Museum’s rich holdings of tapestries.

©Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna

Based on the concept of “system-relevant culture”, which has been discussed in many ways in recent years, the first exhibition by the new artistic director Günther Oberhollenzer aims to stimulate reflection on the value of art for our society.

In this very personal show, Oberhollenzer presents artistic positions that consciously lay claim to social relevance in their works, but he also asks artists how they see their role, what topics they are currently discussing. SYSTEMRELEVANT also sees itself as a programmatic position-fixing: What role and task can art spaces like the Künstlerhaus assume in our present? What can the art-interested public expect from a contemporary art exhibition?

The house, supported by the artists, is an open place of artistic experimentation and socio-political dialogue. The exhibition wants to reflect this and give visibility to a diverse art, which is located in the middle of society and also deals with pressing issues of our time in a very low-threshold way.

SYSTEMRELEVANT is a self-conscious statement for art, art makers and art space, but it wants above all to ask questions, to provide a stimulus for discussion, not to provide answers or even to fall into a justification dynamic. Eighteen artistic positions are represented in the show, of seven of which new works will be created for the exhibition. In this way – also in the sense of sustainability – expensive transports are to be avoided as far as possible and instead artists in Austria are to be supported with project commissions.

Danielle Pamp, Diva in Quarantine, 2020

Max Oppenheimer was an Expressionist pioneer. Born in 1885 in Vienna, he first studied at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts and later at the Art Academy in Prague. He participated in the legendary exhibitions Kunstschau Wien 1908 and Internationale Kunstschau Wien 1909 where he became acquainted with numerous progressive artists of that time, among them Oskar Kokoschka (1886–1980), Egon Schiele (1890–1918) and Albert Paris Gütersloh (1887–1973). Egon Schiele, who was five years his junior, actively sought out the company of Oppenheimer from 1909. Their ensuing friendship lasted many years and manifested in a period of them working together in Schiele’s studio (in the winter of 1910/11) and in the reciprocal appreciation of their respective works. During this time, the two artists portrayed each other several times. While Oppenheimer and Kokoschka also started out as friends, increasing rivalries between the two protagonists of the Austrian avant-garde escalated into a veritable feud. Kokoschka accused Oppenheimer of plagiarism, and turned to his international network to spread his message and discredit Oppenheimer’s oeuvre.

When German troops invaded Austria in 1938, the artist was forced to flee and emigrate via Switzerland to the US, where he died lonely and penniless in 1954.

With this long-overdue, large-scale exhibition, the Leopold Museum intends to shed new light on the eminent and ground-breaking oeuvre of Max Oppenheimer, which has unjustly fallen into oblivion, and to explore the wealth of his works’ motifs. Furthermore, the presentation looks at the role of the artist and his networks through his contemporaries Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele.

©Leopold Museum

©Wong Ping

Curator: Laura Amann

Monia Ben Hamouda, Gymnasium, 2020, courtesy the artist and ChertLüdde, Berlin