Is modernism an epoch? How did artists see this in the 1920s? Reading Time in Space answers these questions by referring to four exhibitions and book projects that constituted the first global presentations of modernism and raised key questions in their own time. These projects rested on new concepts of space and time. They include El Lissitzky’s und Hans Arp’s fictitious exhibition project of 1924 and Friedrich Kiesler’s legendary theater exhibition of the same year. In an installation by Nicole Six/Paul Petritsch, this mumok exhibition explores temporal and spatial coordinates whose parameters are constituted by elements of modernism. Referring to a time of upheaval in the arts, sciences, and society, the concept of modernism is an ongoing point of reference in the art history of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, as works by Werner Feiersinger, Andreas Fogarasi, and Ulrike Grossarth show.
“Crazy like machine forms larger and bolder.” This is how Eva Hesse described a group of finished drawings in 1965 in a letter to her artist friend Sol LeWitt. The idea of “bold forms” can be applied to the artist’s entire oeuvre of drawings, to which mumok is devoting this exhibition. On view is a selection of works on paper from the comprehensive collection at the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College, Ohio, which also houses Hesse’s archive. From early figurative studies to abstract and expressive “doodles” and suggestive and erotic diagrams to preliminary sketches for sculptures, this representative overview shows the special role drawing played in Hesse’s artistic practice. The line, for example, is not used just as sign or marker in Hesse’s works on paper, but also as a thread or a wire, knotted and woven, in the artist’s well-known post-minimalist sculptures. This exhibition is organized by the Estate of Eva Hesse and Hauser & Wirth in collaboration with the Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College
Objects Recognized in Flashes is the title of a group exhibition focusing on surfaces of photographs, products, and bodies. The exhibition was developed by the curator in consultation with the artists Michele Abeles, Annette Kelm, Josephine Pryde, and Eileen Quinlan.