Endless House is a work that perfectly typifies the art and theory of Friedrich Kiesler. Its most conspicuous feature is the fact that space is continuously in flow. The body of this unusual architectural model is somehow spherical and yet irregular. The floor, walls and ceilings seem to be made of endless loops. Kiesler made only two full models of Endless House, one of which is held in the New York Whitney Museum.
Christian Kosmas Mayer’s cross-media works and installations are based on detailed research into history and contemporary society. This is undertaken in order to critically reevaluate history and the present by placing evolutionary and natural phenomena into the framework of cultural history and science. Mayer’s work focuses on critical exploration of questions of archiving and conserving as deliberate acts that create history. For his solo exhibition at mumok, Mayer investigates the dynamic relations between living creatures and inanimate objects. The exhibited objects are witnesses of a frozen moment in time, in which mostly schematically distinct concepts of time such as the past, present, and future, or before and after, and life and death, meld into one. This exhibition explores the theme of conservation both as a natural and as an artificial process of archiving. Motifs from Romanticism are confronted with contemporary narratives that draw on today’s insights from the natural sciences.
Ornament as Promise was the premise of the Pattern and Decoration movement in the United States (1975–1985). In this exhibition, mumok presents the rich collection of works from this movement of Peter and Irene Ludwig, in the largest presentation of Pattern and Decoration in German-speaking Europe since the 1980s. With oriental-style mosaics, monumental textile collages, paintings, installations, and performances, in the 1970s committed feminist artists like Miriam Schapiro, Joyce Kozloff, Valerie Jaudon, and Robert Kushner aimed to bring color, formal diversity, and emotion back into art. Decoration played a key role, with its connotations of the techniques of artisanship. Various ornamental traditions, from the Islamic world to North American Indians to Art Deco, were incorporated in their works, opening up a view beyond geographical and historical boundaries. A proximity to folk art was sought as a deliberate counter to the “purism” of the art of the 1960s.