Exhibitions in spring 2015
Museum der Moderne Salzburg
Moenchsberg 32
5020 Salzburg
Austria
Hours: Tuesday–Sunday 10am–6pm,
Wednesday 10am–8pm,
Monday (during festival season) 10am–6pm
Museum der Moderne Salzburg continues its high-caliber exhibition program in 2015. Highlights in spring are a large mid-career survey by the influential artist Andrea Fraser. The exhibition Salzburg Unbuilt recalls discarded ideas and failed projects for the UNESCO heritage city. Works from the collection from the early 20th century until today will be featured in the exhibition Expressionisms.
Expressionisms – The Collection from Kokoschka to Anzinger
March 7–June 21
Based on her first examination of the museum’s holdings, the newly appointed modern art curator Beatrice von Bormann has organized an exhibition about various forms of Expressionism from the 20th to the 21st century featuring paintings, sculptures, drawings, and prints by about 80 artists. The main focus is on Austrian and German Expressionism, from the early period before World War I to the Neo-Expressionism of the 1960s and 1970s, and the Neue Wilde.
Museum der Moderne Salzburg owns outstanding works from the early Expressionist period by Oskar Kokoschka, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, and Emil Nolde, as well as significant works by Neo-Expressionists such as Markus Lüpertz and Georg Baselitz, and the Neue Wilde in Austria such as Siegfried Anzinger, Erwin Bohatsch, and Gunter Damisch. The specifically Austrian version of Expressive Realism is represented by artists like Georg Eisler and Alfred Hrdlicka.
Andrea Fraser
March 21–July 5
Museum der Moderne Salzburg is the first institution in Austria to present a comprehensive survey of the work of the American artist Andrea Fraser (b. 1965, Billings, Montana, lives in Los Angeles). Her groundbreaking work has sparked controversial debate and made her into one of the most influential artists of her generation.
Fraser’s challenging approach to art is rooted in critical and feminist theory and the legacy of the first generation of artists engaged in feminism and institutional critique. She asks us “what we want from art,” and herself “What do I, as an artist, provide? What do I satisfy?” Through more than three decades she has analyzed the motivations of different stakeholders in the cultural scene as well as their interrelationships. In her artistic practice, she makes herself available both as a protagonist and as a platform for her sociocultural analyses, taking on different roles in the process. Her performances blend humor and pathos with theatrical craft and sophisticated critical analysis.
Organized by Sabine Breitwieser, the museum director, and Tina Teufel, curator, the exhibition presents some 50 works in various media: prints, photographs, installations, performances, text-based works, and videos. It ranges from Four Posters (1984) through celebrated performances such as Museum Highlights (1989), Inaugural Speech (1997), and Official Welcome (2001/2003), to recent works such as Men on the Line (2012). The exhibition will also feature the European premiere of the performance Not Just a Few of Us (2014), presented on video. Her seminal work May I Help You? will be on display in the three versions completed in 1991, 2005, and 2011.
In conjunction with the exhibition, various educational institutions from Austria and Germany are holding a series of seminars and workshops on different topics based on the artist’s work.
Click here for further information.
Salzburg Unbuilt
March 28–July 12
This spring Museum der Moderne Salzburg will offer a completely new perspective of Salzburg in an exhibition devoted for the first time to rejected ideas, failed concepts, and utopian plans for this city. Over the centuries, many outstanding architects have helped to shape the city’s unique character. But their plans were not always put into practice. In collaboration with the Initiative Architektur, guest curator Roman Höllbacher has investigated the myriad studies and competition entries and selected some 30 projects for this exhibition.
Visitors are confronted by the fascinating but also oppressive question of what the city would have looked like if, for example, Vicenzo Scamozzi’s design from 1606 for the cathedral had been built instead of the much smaller version (1614–1628) by Santino Solari. How would the Salzburg Festival have turned out if Hans Poelzig’s mystic vision in 1920 for a festival hall in the grounds of Hellbrunn Palace had been adopted? The exhibition also looks at conflicting concepts and architectural ideas in relation to the museum and its special location at the Mönchsberg, such as Álvaro Siza’s plan for the reconstruction of Casino Winkler (1986), Delugan_Meissl’s panorama elevator (2003) on the cliffs, and Hans Hollein’s epochal Guggenheim Museum (from 1989) built inside the rocks. In this way, the exhibition also tells the story of Museum der Moderne Salzburg.
