Review

The Austrian artist Ida Maly (1894–1941) lived and worked in Vienna, Munich, Berlin and Paris. Committed to a psychiatriac institution as a schizophrenic in the 1920s, the works she created there read like prophecies of the atrocities of euthanasia the National Socialists had in store for inmates of such institutions. In 1941 Ida Maly was murdered in the Hartheim Euthanasia Centre. Her work documents the life of a highly talented artist in the reputedly “golden 1920s”, who found her own artistic language “between the established styles”.

With a line-up of more than two hundred works of art from the Viennese SAMMLUNG VERBUND, the Lentos Kunstmuseum shows how eighty-two female artists put question marks in the 1970s against the construct of the female. The exhibition extols the pioneering achievement of the “Feminist Avant-Garde”. For the first time in the history of art, artists in different continents jointly focussed on the suppression of women.

Having grown up in an upper-middleclass environment, after World War I Emmy Haesele (1894–1987) and her physician husband settled in Unken, a municipality near Lofer. Engrossed in philosophy and theosophy, she began to experiment with drawing in 1931. The writer and brother-in-law of Alfred Kubin, Oskar A. H. Schmitz, soon arranged a meeting between the metaphysically inclined artist and the renowned draughtsman. A relationship lasting until 1936 developed between the aging magician based in Zwickledt and young, self-assured Emmy. Inspired by her visions, she creates expressive, fairy-tale and occasionally sharply disquieting images.

“I’ve never done it before so I’m quite sure I’ll be able to cope”, Pippi Langstrumpf declares. This is the kind of self-assured attitude we would like our children to develop. Do we also give them sufficient opportunity to live their curiosity? Today’s overprotection of children by their “helicopter” or "lawnmower” parents and the rapid progress of digitalisation, which puts a brake on children’s innate urge to explore things by themselves, make this doubtful. Children survive the most absurd pedagogical concepts and they even endure war, social deprivation, neglect and abuse, but at what price?

In parallel with the continuity of extremist rightwing political ideas there is an afterlife of the repeated representation of fascism in art and literature and an appropriation of its aesthetic set pieces in popular culture and (transgressive) subculture. This exhibition pulls together a great number of works and strategies that address this phenomenon, ranging from appropriation and mimetic subversion to the analytic contemplation, re-staging and deconstruction of fascistoid mechanisms.

At the Lentos cabinet, Luciano Castelli (b. 1951) issues an invitation to the art nouveau villa Reckenbühl in Luzern, where the artist and his housemates celebrated life as an elaborately arranged party. The villa's rooms provided the backdrop for his photo series, most of which were shot with self-timer, making Castelli a pioneer of gender blurring.

In 2020, internationally acclaimed Swiss artist Franz Gertsch will celebrate his 90th birthday. Rising to the occasion, the Lentos Kunstmuseum Linz will put on an exhibition of his monumental paintings focused on the period of Gertsch’s emergence in the international art scene in the 1970s.

Much too young and entirely unexpectedly, Linda Bild passed away in the summer of 2019. The Lentos puts on the first retrospective for the Viennese artist. This show, however, is not going to be a laid-back overview: Bilda's poetical politpop in its many different incarnations has left nothing untried to disturb the world's slumber.

Jakob Lena Knebl stages an environment that makes the Lentos Collection appear in a new light. Appealing powerfully to the sense, the artist presents two rooms in the Lentos basement as bipolar opposites, contrasting a colourful side with a dark one. By combining her own works with a curatorial approach marked by a distinctly artistic touch, Knebl achieves a politically grounded reassessment of the collection.

“A picture keeps everything open, while language imposes constraints.” This is the insight young Josef Bauer arrived at as a student at the Linzer Kunstschule, where Herbert Dimmel was his teacher between 1956 and 1964. Even at that early stage he was already concerning himself with issues of media critique.

The renowned Polish artist Paweł Althamer has made a name for himself with participative art projects, figurative sculptures and performative selfportraits. Many of his works are shaped by social collaboration and the use he makes of his immediate environment and of persons close to him. While his projects try to get to the bottom of social structures and networks, they end up not infrequently by joining them.

The life and activities of the art dealer Wolfgang Gurlitt (1888–1965) are closely intertwined with the beginnings of the Lentos Kunstmuseum: for the museum, the Gurlitt Collection is a legacy that is as brilliant as it is problematic. The exhibition casts light on the turbulent life of the passionate collector and controversial art dealer Wolfgang Gurlitt, who was involved in deals with looted art during the National Socialist era.

The title Otto Zitko has given to his exhibition at the Lentos Kunstmuseum, "Retroprospektiv", refers to the artist’s gaze whose orientation towards the future can only be understood in the light of its development and sharpening in past encounters. This collision between “prospective” and “retrospective” manifests itself in the selection of exhibits which is comprised both of works from the early 1980s and from present production. The majority of works are on loan from various Austrian collections.

The artistic creativity of patients in psychiatric institutions elicits growing public interest, but it has not yet been given the scholarly attention it deserves. A unique project carried out under the aegis of Katrin Luchsinger at Zurich’s Hochschule der Künste has resulted in a collection of such works that were produced in Switzerland’s cantonal clinics around 1900.

Maria Lassnig and Arnulf Rainer rank among Austria’s most successful artists. Lassnig would be 100 this year, Rainer celebrates his 90th birthday. The two first met in Klagenfurt in 1948. The years they spent together proved of seminal importance for both their works.

This exhibition raises the question of how to account for the fascination photography has continued to exert from its beginnings to the present day. What is the essence of photography? 180 years after the invention of photography it has retained its mythical quality: the magic connection that exists between an object and its depiction.

A decade of eruptions, departures and redefinitions in the steel city Linz. The year I968 marks a turning point that ushered in a new era. Across Western Europe and in the United States Student protests and workers’ revolts called into question the post-war power structure itself, while Soviet tanks bulldozed the Prague Spring into the ground and signalled the end of the hope that the Eastern Bloc would open up to the West.

Tatiana Lecomte’s film "Ein mörderischer Lärm" [A Hellish Noise] features the report by a contemporary witness about his time as a slave labourer at the Gusen concentration camp. This film marks the Point of entry to an exhibition that is focussed on how the media represent historical events in 1938, a year that had grave consequences not only for Austria.

Perplexed by what was purported to be a world without female artists in the electronic music/art genre, Elisabeth Schimana embarked on a search in the 1990s. Projects like "portrait 01 - Die Futuristin" − produced by ORF − Austrian Broadcasting Company’s Ö1 Kunstradio – led, following the founding of the IMA Institute of Media Archeology in 2005, to a series of video portraits with the title IMAfiction, in which 10 female artists, pioneers of their time, told rather a different story and together wove a fascinating network of interrelationships.

What is fascinating about Nilbar Güreş’s art is the unique poetic and humorous inventiveness that always also has a critical and political underside. In her photographs, collages, objects and videos, Güreş explores clichés of the social visibility of women in different cultural fields, whether in Turkey, her country of origin, or in Brazil. She sketches out and stages humorously challenging counter-images and -figures, in which she subverts conventional role attributions. At the same time, she subtly brings into play the defensive attitude of western society toward the dress codes of cultures influenced by religion. Her pictures and objects evince a high degree of sensuous materiality, are strangely puzzling, often charged with eroticism, and lead into a multifaceted, contradictory reality that prompts reflection. The retrospective is comprised of works dating to the period between 2006 and today and includes four productions created especially for this exhibition.

Examining the process of work is a dominant concern for Katharina Gruzei. The series "Bodies of Work" focuses on the Linz shipyard ÖSWAG. Camera in hand Gruzei accompanied the construction of a large ferry over a period of two months. Man and machine are seen to be perfectly attuned to each other in the industrial production process.

Gruzei views the “working body” in this context as a “site for the negotiation of the always topical discourse on the place accorded to work and the changes taking place within it”.

1918 meant a deep incision for art in Austria: the deaths of Gustav Klimt (6.2.1918), Koloman Moser (18.10.1918) and Egon Schiele ( 31.10.1918), with the latter being especially untimely, deprived Vienna’s avant-garde three of its most outstanding exponents in a matter of months. The end of World War I saw not only the demise of the German Empire and the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, it also spelt the end to art as a decorative and curative power.

The Large Hall of the Lentos is transformed into a fashion store! The Austrian artist Ines Doujak presents her highly unusual fashion collections. The exhibition space mutates temporarily into a changing room: visitors are welcome to touch, try on and take pictures. Citing and at the same time calling into question the glamour of the fashion world, Doujak’s works are characterized both by their determined criticism and their beauty. The artist brings into play the exploitative structures and the gender and class order hardwired into haute couture and the garment industry and deliberately blurs the demarcation line separating fashion statement and art.

The exhibition space in the lower level of Lentos will temporarily become the Valie Export Archive and provide insights into the artist's thinking, research and development of ideas. In this way she becomes comprehensible as a public person, theorist, and teacher through an abundance of documents, autographs, sketches, and drafts, and also as a private person in letters, poems, photos and notes. In addition, what has been collected and “preserved” opens up a view of the artistic network and collective memory of a period of over fifty years.

The endless expanse of the night sky before our eyes, the shining stars almost close enough to touch! It’s gone now, the dark night. It has been conquered by electric light. Buildings, squares and streets are brightly illuminated at night. The lights of the big cities have blocked out the starry sky that can now hardly be seen. Light smog has meanwhile robbed a third of the world population of the view of the Milky Way, shooting stars and glowing comets.

Where is Turnton, the livable little town by the sea? It is everywhere where the art collective Time’s Up sets up the backdrop of the charming bar in the harbor of the fictive coastal settlement and creates an evening mood with comfortably muted dim lighting. As indicated by the job offers divulged on the screen above the closed entrance to the harbor master’s office, several posters in the bar, and a random newspaper left lying around, visitors to the town have unwittingly traveled through time. They find themselves three decades later, in the year 2047. It is anything but comfortable here, though – water and soil are contaminated and entire eco-systems have collapsed. However, there are also positive counter-movements, such as the cultivation of purifying algae, which counteracts the pollution of the sea.

For his first mid-career survey exhibition in Austria, Marko Lulić, assisted by the curator Wilfried Kuehn, has designed an overview of his work.

Sculpture, large-scale installations, video, posters, lettering, and works in public space are the artist’s preferred media, which he will bring together in a completely new constellation in the exhibition space. Utopian aspects of the twentieth century are analyzed, translated and queried here. Architecture and display, central themes in his work, become the means of a restaging in the museum.

Arnulf Rainer is considered one of the most influential, but also one of the most innovative and provocative artists in Austria. His art is just as complex as it is contradictory. As someone always pushing the limits and as an anti-artist, Rainer has been working since the 1950s on overpaintings. His tireless striving for expansion includes serial work, but also the attempt to block out consciousness in an intensive process of creating.

The extensive exhibition shows drawings from between the poles of art and madness from the 1960s and 1970s. In addition to works by Art brut artists from Gugging, such as Johann Hauser, Oswald Tschirtner and August Walla, works by Arnulf Rainer, Peter Pongratz, Adolf Frohner, Hermann Nitsch, Franz Ringel and Alfred Hrdlicka are also presented.

In her films, sculptures and installations, Nevin Aladağ (b. 1972 in Van, Turkey) works both with traditional materials and techniques and with elements borrowed from pop and youth culture. She is equally at home with manual skills and the digital media. Musical motifs run as a thread through many of her works. Music has the potential of imparting a sense of identity to a community and of overcoming social and cultural limitations at the same time. An important frame of reference for the artist is the metropolis of our time with its vast array of hybrid practices, its ever changing, multi-piece pictures and its power of inclusion.

A liaison of acoustic signals and water turns the Lentos Reading Room into a sound composition. Water drips onto an audio cable, thus triggering small short circuits, which are acoustically amplified to become audible. Different drop speeds and chance determine the constant minor changes in the composition. Julia Tazreiter thus draws our attention to everyday phenomena, situations, and noises that are all too often hidden, avoided, and ignored. The arrangement of the cables results in a focus on their details, imbuing them with a sculptural dimension at the same time.

Ingeborg Strobl’s work is to be read as a narrative continued, as a fabric where each thread is interwoven with another. Appropriating, highlighting, correlating are all mainstays of the approach with which she charges her material with new meaning. Strobl’s principal media include collage, photography, offset print/artist’s book, watercolour, and video. But her oeuvre also comprises large-scale art-in-architecture designs.

The Lentos is dedicating a show to the manifold and interdisciplinary work of gallery owner and exhibition organizer René Block. Being one of the pioneers to promote intermedia art, Fluxus and happenings, René Block played a decisive role in the Neo-Avantgarde. As director and initiator of numerous biennials worldwide, Block established a unique story of tracking, showing, collecting and exhibiting modern art.

Anya Titova (b. 1984) has been making an impact on the art scene as an artist, curator, collector, researcher and exhibition designer. Her projects are based on historical and/or scientific material and are realised in a number of different media such as film, photography, objects, installations and architecture. In her first museum exhibition in Austria, the artist puts on display A Time Capsule – a fantastic, fictional architectural structure that calls the human order of things into question. Transposed into new contexts, the artefacts that she uses link events of the past to topical themes, underscore points of contact and highlight what has perhaps been overlooked or suppressed until now.
The artist lives and works in Moscow.

Super mom or childless? It almost looks as if there were no such thing any longer as motherhood pure and simple, as if all that is left is the choice between perfectionism and resignation. Nevertheless, motherhood has many aspects: joy, an intense experience of life, love relationship, learning, exultation, on one hand, and, on the other, frustration, being weighed down by expectations and the fear of being inadequate to the task. Until the 19th century motherhood was never called into question even if in actual reality the rewards often fell woefully short of projected ideals. It was only the advent of career openings for women that created alternatives to motherhood as a fulfilled life.

“Waldung” is a colloquial term. A “Waldung” is a bit bigger than a small wood. It’s a feature of the woodlands in the region into which I was born. (Bernhard Fuchs)

Lentos Kunstmuseum Linz presents the largest and most comprehensive display of work to date by Turner Prize nominated artist Cathy Wilkes (b. 1966 Belfast, lives and works in Glasgow). Bringing together more than a decade of the artist’s acclaimed work, this unique exhibition includes several of her largescale sculptural installations alongside paintings, works on paper and archive materials.

The last great stocktaking of the Collection in 2013 coincided with the tenth anniversary of the Lentos ’s foundation. Since then a number of works of art have been acquired – time for the presentation of the new arrivals.

In the 1980s new content and a revolutionary new aesthetic made their first appearance in the world of Western fashion. Features such as the search for authenticity, melancholy as a pervasive attitude, and bold formal experiments had been exclusively reserved to the fine arts until then. Now they were taken up by fashion. Martin Margiela, Rei Kawakubo and other outstanding designers subjected the concept of beauty in fashion to a radical makeover, where deformation and wear and tear become exciting stylistic devices. The torn jeans that are a staple of mainstream fashion these days first saw the light of day in designs by Maison Martin Margiela and Comme des Garçons. Fashion becomes a mirror in which we come face to face with our own mortality. It emphasizes the traces of time, praises transience and flirts with death.

Transformation and memory are the key themes that inform Latifa Echakhch’s oeuvre. As part of the consistent pursuit of her approach, the artist has combined in this exhibition three work groups and individual objects, all dealing with deconstruction and change.

Water, a resource that is a precondition for life like no other, is increasingly coming under pressure for ecological as well as economic reasons. Water keeps us alive, water is in need of protection as a public good. Pure water is also an emotional resource and a prime ingredient for wellbeing and happiness.

As a politically involved artist Oliver Ressler (born 1970, lives in Vienna) is committed to doing on-site research to analyse economic conditions and forms of political organizing in different places in the world. Many of his works are concerned with forms of resistance, e.g. in the alter-globalization movement or the movement of the squares. He typically pursues alternative approaches to the existing systems of power, presenting them as viable options in films, photographs and installations.

The elderly, the sick, the disabled, the poor and the unemployed are the first victims of urban development devised by experts, politicians and financiers. But dignity and lucidity remain intact on the victims' side.

Disorienting, facetious, polarising – Alois Mosbacher, one of the neo-savages or “Neue Wilde”, has featured prominently in the art world ever since he first caused a splash in the 1980s, when the reputedly dead art of painting was revived. With his figurative sensuality, painterly bravado and narrative vigour and drawing on a great number of different sources for inspiration, he is prepared to this day to risk new departures in his painting.

In this premiere, the Lentos puts a spatial installation of paintings on display by an artist, who is one of Austria’s internationally most renowned painters and graphic artists.

Large-scale paintings by Hildegard Joos (1909–2005) are frequently dominated in their structure by square, circular, triangular and/or elliptical shapes. Born in Lower Austria, Joos was especially influenced by the experiences she gained in the art scene of Paris, where she lived from 1959 together with her husband, the Swiss born philosopher and painter Harold Joos (1913–2004). From 1982 the artist couple signed their works jointly H+H Joos.

The Lenin, the first nuclear-powered ice-breaker in the world, is anchored today, preserved in its original Soviet magnificence, in Murmansk as a museum ship. Russian and Austrian artists have developed works on relevant contemporary themes for an exhibition on board in Fall 2013. In Lentos a selection will be shown of the works on the Cold War and its consequences with a documentation from Murmansk.

Pie Fights! Fist Fights! Chases!
Major turbulences, but also minor everyday mishaps – like the slippery banana peel – have become famous slapstick scenes. Visual artists are hot on the heels of the great masters and make use of the cultural codes of slapstick. In various media they purposely play with slapstick quotations, motifs and concepts borrowed from the genre.

Luisa Kasalicky’s exhibition at the Lentos invites visitors to take part in an intriguing game of illusions that will present a challenge to their senses. Being the first light composition the artist has developed for a museum, it is also something of a première.

This exhibition is devoted to the phenomenon of Glam, which originated in Great Britain in the early 70s, importing opulence, glamour and extravagance as forms of expression to the most diverse genres of art. With its wealth of exhibits the show embraces exponents of Glam as diverse as David Bowie, Glitter Rock and Roxy Music; stylists and fashion designers such as Ossie Clark and Antony Price; and film, photography, graphic design and fine art – with artists such as Gilbert & George, Nan Goldin, Cindy Sheman and Richard Hamilton.

HR Giger is the featured artist at Ars Electronica 2013. The Swiss native gained worldwide renown with his Alien creature that played a major role in Ridley Scott’s 1979 science fiction film attaining cult status. The exhibition at the Lentos features world-famous images as well as some of the artist’s paintings, sculptures, graphics and short films that have never been shown before.
The exhibition traces HR Giger’s path from the Necronom cycle to his latest work featured in the 2012 film Prometheus. Giger’s legendary Alien Diaries from 1978–79 are among the rarities on display at the Lentos.

Olafur Eliasson, born of Icelandic parents in Copenhagen in 1967, is world famous for his projects and installations in museums and urban space. Classified as "experimental set-ups" by the artist, his work ranges from photography, film and installation to sculpture and architectural projects. The materials Eliasson works with include light, colour and such phenomena of nature as fog and water. His experiments aim to give us insights into how physical movement, sensory impressions and the interplay between the latter and neurological processing influence our perception of the world.

Film, photography and video are the media Heike Baranowsky uses to explore space and time. Like only a few contemporary artists, Baranowsky succeeds in interlinking analysis and sensuality in such a way that our attention is captured. She is able to send us into a different time and to different places with the moving images.

At first glance, Dodge’s exhibitions may seem sparse or unelaborate. In fact, the objects presented are carriers of action in processes that are often staged over a long period of time. His works usually consist of objects that are familiar from everyday life, and a title. The gap between the two evokes a story – possibly something that really happened, possibly a fiction – thus referring to the poetic potential of reality.

The Lentos celebrates the 10th anniversary of its foundation and puts its collection centre stage. What is awaiting you is no less than a brand new presentation of the Lentos’s collection, a leisurely stroll through the history of art and all the pleasures of a reunion with old favourites combined with making the acquaintance of exciting new works.

Contemporaneously to the exhibition The naked Man the Lentos presents in one gallery a selection of main works of its own collection.

On display are about 30 paintings from the classic modern dealing with the image of the humankind.

Facial hair has always been considered a secondary male sexual characteristic. Its naturalness contrasts fashionable design that turns elemental growth into a (self-)image full of social and sexual meanings. In contrast to the wild hairiness of "savages" and undesirables, the cultivated beard has been interpreted for centuries as a symbol of power, dignity and wisdom. Today a beard serves primarily as a resource for self-expression, such as in designer stubble identifying rebelliously attractive conformity or a fluffy organic beard signalizing the desire for authenticity.

The naked man is invisible. Does the male body have nothing to say to us? On the contrary. This exhibition tells how man has been re-inventing himself since the last century – and how he faces his nakedness. With courage and doubts, with a joy in new ways of living. And how self-confident women artists have conquered a motif that was long forbidden to them.

Sean Scully is the first major solo exhibition of the artist in Austria in more than a decade.The presentation of fifty paintings by the Irish artist enables the Lentos to provide a representative overview of his oeuvre.

The interest of the Japanese artist Seiko Mikami is focused on the human body in the age of the information society. In her large-scale installation Desire of Codes, visitors find themselves observed by a great number of fixed and/or mobile surveillance cameras.

In their multimedia work the artist duo Gil & Moti negate the existence of boundaries separating life and art, and performance and social intervention. As Jewish Israelis and homosexual immigrants living in Rotterdam, they contribute to discourses about being different and about sets of rules that are supposed to regulate social existence.

It is considered the human's favorite toy – the automobile. As a cult object and symbol of individual freedom, it epitomizes mobility and expresses lifestyle and luxury. At the same time, the car stands for the endangerment of our planet: exploitation of resources, environmental destruction, traffic gridlock, accidents. And at the practical level of everyday life: trouble with finding parking spaces, costly mechanics' hours, tailgaters on the motorway, the rising cost of fuel. Then again the pleasure of a new car: Let's go! The automobile remains persistently attractive. How long can that continue to work?, we wonder worriedly – and get into the car.

In her video essays and installations, Ursula Biemann investigates themes like migration and gender politics against the background of globalization, free trade zones, virtual communication and the construction of border defenses on the part of highly developed states. The artist, who is also internationally active as a curator, lecturer and networker, draws her material from video recordings on site, interviews with experts, from archives and virtual information sources, and from theoretical texts.

Picking his way through the art history documented in the Lentos Collection, Rudi Klein, a.k.a. Ivan Klein a.k.a. Ruud Klein, the creator of the wise and unflappable "Lochgott", the "God of the Hole", traces the trajectory of the past century with commemorative curios, things he values and sketched comments from his rich archives.

Markus Schinwald is one of the most internationally acclaimed artists of his generation. In 2011 – almost at the same time as the major solo exhibition in Lentos Kunstmuseum – he is presented at the Austrian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale.

Elfriede Trautner's artistic oeuvre shows how she perceived and coped with the social structures in Linz of the 1960s and 1970s as a woman.
Trautner worked for thirty-five years as secretary at the Bruckner Conservatory in Linz (today the Anton Bruckner Private University). In her free time, the alumna of the Linz School of Arts and Crafts created hundreds of drypoint prints of outstanding technique.

... (Woran glauben die Motten, wenn sie zu den Lichtern streben)

4.56-billion-year-old meteorites, a painting from the collection of the Lentos, a closed eco system and a checklist that travelled to the moon and back with the astronauts on board Apollo: four highly diverse objects that are used by Ralo Mayer (b. 1976, lives/works in Vienna) in the first part of his exhibition to throw light on his own work from the last few years. Space, the history of its exploration and utopias that tried (in the past) to predict what the world would look like in the future form the thematic backdrop for these works. Like all science fiction that deserves the name, they are deeply rooted in present-day reality and transfer social and economic facts into multifaceted stories.

Two prominent stars of international art, Gilbert & George, the "Godfathers of British Art", for the first time in Linz, in Lentos. Gilbert (born 1943) and George (born 1942), artists since 1967, have long since become icons of contemporary art. In 1986 they won the Turner Prize. In 2005 they represented England at the Venice Biennale. With their credo "Art for All" and with the idea of making themselves the subject of their pictures as "living sculptures", they have expanded the concept of art and sculpture since the sixties.

Succinct and enigmatic at the same time: Friedl vom Gröller's short films radiate an irresistible attraction. Her work centers around the image of the human being. Is the camera merely a technical eye for recording segments of reality, or can it do much more? Do self-perception and self-presentation change with the awareness of recording, of reproducibility? Using the media of photography and film Friedl vom Gröller investigates the roles of the filmmaker and her models.

Do what? asks a major exhibition presenting Art povera with its most important representatives. With over one hundred works, the exhibition concentrates on the core period of the movement from 1967 to 1972.

The aim of artists such as Mario Merz, Alighiero Boetti, Jannis Kounellis or Michelangelo Pistoletto was to decrease the distance between the work and the viewer. The new art was to be simpler and more modest in its means, more authentic in its materials.

For over twenty-seven years, Gerhard Haderer has been poking around in the entrails of our world, tearing down facades, and drawing a fine point on what he meticulously observes: everyday madness! Often enough, this manifests itself – how could it be otherwise – in trivialities: whether it is a minister's hair-do, the shiny white teeth of a fitness guru, or the potbelly of a neighbor on the beach – the masterly drawn exaggeration reveals (what now becomes) the obvious truth, all the way to a tragicomic element. Ongoing publications form a chronicle of our time with all its high points, misfortunes and scandals.

Siegfried A. Fruhauf relates his film and photography works to the spatial structure of the museum as counterpoints and visual quotations. The works remain autonomous, but can be newly interpreted in the interplay with their surroundings. In a certain position icons of art history are distilled into their digital essay, while in another there is an exaggerated staging of the theme of surveillance with a disturbing, oversized pair of eyes. A journey to the intersections of space and image.

In the work of Dutch artist Mathilde ter Heijne doubles assume a key role.
Using plaster casts of her face and her hands, ter Heijne makes life-size puppets in her own image. These dummies then put in appearances in her installations, sculptures, audio and video works and make it possible for the artist to take part in artistic disquisitions on such topics as pain and violence. They also feature in the context of research on matriarchy and dream therapy.

With his new pictures Siegfried Anzinger has opened up a fresh, exciting chapter in his artistic career. The Cologne-based Upper Austrian is considered one of the most internationally renowned Austrian painters and graphic artists. He has long been closely associated with Lentos and its predecessor institution the Neue Galerie.

The Lentos Kunstmuseum Linz and the Belvedere Vienna are jointly developing an extensive exhibition on one of the most internationally renowned Austrian media artists. Valie Export has realized a large and consistent oeuvre in over four decades of extensive artistic work with performances, photography, film and media installations.

After the Conceptual Art, the videos, installations and photo work of the 1970s, young Austrian artists re-established a rapport with gestural expressionism as defined within the tradition of Austrian painting by Richard Gerstl, Oskar Kokoschka and Max Weiler.

Who actually "makes" a museum? How does a so-called cultural instituation take shape?

Artist Uli Aigner (AT/DE) is interested in what motivates people involved in the field of culture to act as they do.

The Triennale Linz 1.0 launches, an exhibition format that is to be newly established in Austria: a topical survey of art production in this country.

Together, the State Gallery Linz, Lentos Kunstmuseum Linz, and the OK Offenes Kulturhaus Upper Austria show a representative cross-sectional time line through the current local art scene, positioning Linz as a center of Austrian contemporary art.

The musicians Karin Fisslthaler and Richard Eigner set out on an expedition through the entire Lentos architecture – interior and exterior – to investigate the specific architectural sonic image of the museum.

Using multiple sound installations and acoustic interventions, the results are made audible in the most diverse locations.

"Das letzte gebaute Auto wird ein Porsche sein." [The last car to be built will be a Porsche] (Ferry Porsche)

As soon as she finished her studies at the Art Academy Düsseldorf, the German artist Asta Gröting was already received as one of the leading positions in sculpture in the 1980s and exhibited world-wide. In the 1990s her work was marked by a media turn to the field of video art. Recently Gröting has increasingly devoted her attention to the production of objects again, so that she has meanwhile created a rich oeuvre in various media and material.

The exhibition distributed among several institutions seeks shared intersections: writers who draw – visual artists who write, works conjoining both modes and thus demonstrating a smooth transition between two genres of creative expression.

The exhibition Point of Intersection explores the significance of Linz as a place where art is created and collected. In the surroundings of the Art University and Ars Electronica, Linz is not only a fascinating place for art productions, but also cultivates a vibrant practice of collecting modern and contemporary art. This is reflected in both the international orientation of the Lentos Collection and in the city purchases of contemporary art affiliated with Linz.

A high point of the exhibition year 2009 at the Lentos is an extensive show, covering 12 rooms, about Herbert Bayer, the famous Bauhaus artist originally from Upper Austria.

Michaela Melián is interested in the politics of memory and the ongoing impact of phenomena of contemporary history. She works with (his)stories, with traces of the past, which can gain significance for the present as "unused potentials of a lost future" (Jan Verwoert).

How does the Cultural Capital of Europe end up with an art collection commensurate with that title? That's easy: it gathers a collection.

Stories on, with and about Linz are told on the basis of collection holdings from the Museums of the City of Linz (Lentos, Nordico – Museum of the City of Linz). Paintings, graphic works, photography, sculptures, film stills, objects, videos and examples of architecture, all from the last one hundred years, show the various stages of the development of Linz: selected examples from art and culture show the identity of the city.

Mesopotamian Dramaturgies brings together a new series of work by the internationally successful Turkish artist Kutlug Ataman. In his film, video and photography work he explores the breaks between "the own" and "the other" – with traditions and conventions, beliefs and convictions that can trigger conflicts within a society or in a clash of different cultures.

"Is photography art? This question shouldn't be asked. Art is obsolete. We need something else. You have to watch light at work. It is light that creates. I sit before a piece of light-sensitive paper and think."

(Man Ray, 1928)

In the exhibition Oskar Kokoschka. A Vagabond in Linz. Wild, denigrated, celebrated, the Lentos documents the great Austrian painter, who was a non-conformist all his life, and focuses on his contacts with Linz.

Featured Art Scene of the Ars Electronica 2008

Ecology of Techno Mind presents a selection of works by Slovenian artists who are deploying technology and science as a means of delving into social realty today. Among the projects' themes are new media, biotechnology, space exploration and the use of computers in the medical field.

A project by qujOchÖ for the UEFA Euro 2008

From 7 to 29 June 2008 the football European Championship takes place in Switzerland and Austria. In this context, the exhibition Living in the Penalty Area by the Linz artist group qujOchÖ at the Lentos attempts to intervene in this gigantic football machinery. Even though this enormous spectacle penetrates deep into everyday life, Living in the Penalty Area will concentrate on the essence of football: moves and strategies – in short: what actually happens on the playing field. Video projections of important games will be created using aesthetic reduction, minimalist representations of complex game plays and movements, with network analyses, statistical data and depictions of compressions and energy.

"The whole world" knows Eva & Adele, the extravagant artist couple from Berlin that has been adding glamor to the major events of the international art world for over fifteen years: conspicuous, sparkling, attractive.

With the exhibition Troublemakers. The Enfants Terribles of the Avant-Garde from Makart to Nitsch the Lentos presents a museum show of exemplary infamous troublemakers of Austrian art history from the fin de siècle to Actionism.

With the exhibition Haus-Rucker-Co Live again the Lentos shows the centerpiece of the exhibition staging of Live from 1970*.

The exhibition The Crystals of Time offers a concentrated insight into Ursula Mayer's current film work. Mayer's most recent film The Crystal Gaze (2007) is presented here for the first time. The trilogy Portland Place 33, Keeling House and Villa Mairea (2005/06) can be seen in a thematic conjunction with this most recent work.

A thematic media history exhibition on the medium of the projected image with slide series and light installations of pioneering works from the early 1970s to the present.

The exhibition "Projection" is devoted to one of the most fascinating themes of art since the 1960s. It uses paradigmatic works to develop a historical passageway up to the present.

Summer Exhibitions under the Banner of the Lentos Collection.

Great, greater, greatest, ...
Center stage for masterpieces of painting and graphic arts from the museum collection – naturally in the large exhibition hall.
Large format and top quality works, paintings and drawings from the museum holdings are the focal point of this show that offers a new perspective of different style directions in recent art since 1945 up to the present.

I too am a lonely Steppenwolf (Helene Funke to Hermann Hesse, 1944)

With Helene Funke the Lentos Art Museum presents an Austrian artist, whose work has still to be rediscovered. Funke belongs to the generation of artists from the early 20th century, whose impact has not yet been honoured as it deserves.

"You noted, one does not write light on a dark ground, only the alphabet of the stars appears like that, sketch-like or refracting; the human being carries on with black on white." (Stéphane Mallarmé)

"The drawing can be understood as a place for signs, through which we depict the world, and at the same time as the primary sign of being. The drawing is thus not a window to the world, but rather an instrument for comprehending our place in the universe." (Walter Benjamin)

Dreaming the Future in the Present.

The exhibition shows installations by seven international artists, some of whom are presented for the first time in Austria. Born between Argentina and Denmark, between 1957 and 1978, they represent a globally operating generation of art producers gaining strong recognition and influence through their presence at biennials, art fairs and the major exhibition venues.

With the Krenek exhibition Lentos presents a rarity, since Krenek's visual creative work, his watercolor painting, has never been shown before to this extent. By his own definition, Krenek was a hobby painter with no claim to professionalism. That his love for watercolor accompanied him throughout his life (especially in his second home in the US) is clear from the selection taken from over 80 paintings. The presentation is supplemented with works by Krenek's contemporaries, such as Alma Mahler and Oskar Kokoschka. A listening station, film material and literature to browse through round out the exhibition.

Lentos shows 19 works from its own collection.

Adolf Frohner is dead. The famous painter and graphic artist died unexpectedly on January 24, 2007 at the age of 73. The artist was always on friendly terms with the Lentos Kunstmuseum. The collection includes 4 paintings - important early works - and 37 graphic works, which will be presented in the fifth exhibition hall of the collection from February 7 until the end of May.

Video as Urban Condition explores how video has become part of the fabric of the city and of urban experience: how video mediates the web of interactions between media and architecture, subject and commodity, identity and desire, the city and its phantasmagoria. The ´urban condition´ not only means the built environment, it also includes social and political conditions, questions of identity and subjectivity.

The exhibition at the Lentos brings together Herwig Kempinger's works of the last two decades for the first time in a major show. The essential blocks of his photographic oeuvre are presented together with the most recent paintings, and his early Super-8 films can also be seen.

I have never let myself be constrained by an art theory or a doctrine. (Herbert Bayer)

27 Museums on 4 Continents in 2 Hours!

It seems that museums have taken over the job of landmarks that cathedrals used to have. They are regarded as symbols of cultural identification in a society that currently finds itself in a state of insecurity, due not least of all to increasing globalization. The most spectacular museum buildings enhance the attractiveness of cities, shift remote places to the center of public attention with their conspicuous presence.

The museum breaks open its walls. The old ambition of the avant-garde of modernism, the unfinished agenda of the museum in the 21st century – Peter Köllerer translates it into images with which he radically changes the Lentos Collection rooms. The "White Cube" (Brian O´Doherty) of the presentation of painting surrenders its noble reserve.

For Johanna and Helmut Kandl art is a means of shedding light on the world, on countries and regions, history, politics and the economy, and on other people. The exhibition uses paintings, video and installations to examine the social changes of the present time in which an unregulated market economy in the former socialist countries constitutes a type of avant-garde. In their examination, the Kandls do not focus on the global players but on the micro-economy and matters concerning private individuals.

"The work to be realized is, in a sense, a shared place (un lieu commun), a mutual penetration of the outside world and the self. It can no longer be the object itself, and it can no longer be only the self alone. It has to be a (new) creation ..." (Raymond Duchamp-Villon, 1924)

The Nature series consists of a series of seven "motion paintings", representing abstract forms evocative of those found in nature. Between three to six minutes in length, each motion painting is made up of several short sequences depicting intensely colored abstract shapes and patterns that constantly move, expand and evolve. Culling his metaphors from nature – trees, sky, grass, moon, fire, wind, rain, snow – John Maeda offers us a glimpse of digital space in the spirit of landscape painting.

Unexpected encounters with art works of the 20th century juxtaposed with masterpieces of Anatolian Kilims are the focal point of an exhibition that conveys an image of elementary creativity that is as diverse as it is multifaceted.

The exhibition centers around a new film by the two Californian artists, which Lentos is co-producing together with Redcat, Los Angeles, and which will be filmed at locations in Linz, Los Angeles and the magnificent river landscape of the Snake River in Wyoming.

In honor of Heinrich Heidersberger´s 100th birthday, the Lentos Art Museum presents the seven photo works that belong to Lentos, augmented by six more works on loan from the Heidersberger Institute in Wolfsburg.

In Spring 2006 an extensive show of work by Gottfried Helnwein will be presented in the large exhibition hall of the Lentos Museum. Lentos thus organizes the artist's first museum show in Austria since he left the land of his birth in the mid-1980s – Helnwein was born in Vienna in 1948. After spending years in Germany, Helnwein now lives in Los Angeles and Ireland.

"What is it that makes Vanessa Jane Phaff's work so sharply attuned to the times and, at the same time, so anachronistic, full of doom and promise, so fascinating and uncanny?" (L. Hanssen)

Matt Mullican (born 1951 in Santa Monica, California, lives in New York) is a multimedia artist in the broadest sense. The scope of his media and forms of expression is enormous, ranging from fragile models to to bulky sculptures, from reliefs to drawings, collages, light boxes, computer animations, glass works, video and performances. Mullican essentially works on systematizing a subjective world view. To this end he has developed a system of pictograms as his personal model of a cosmology.

A winter panorama out of the collections of the museums of the city of Linz.
The Three Kings Caspar, Melchior and Balthasar bring the museum their gifts. Angels from Nordico and the Lentos-Krampus (St. Nicholas´counterpart) provide new views of the collection.

The Viennese artist Jack Hauser works in many disciplines: visual art, film, performance, literature. He likes to slip into various roles, operating under code names, using this gesture of distancing to subvert the glorification of creative genius and authorship. Quotations, appropriation and collages are also themes and methods used in his panels, the motifs of which are composed of items from a wide variety of sources, including comic strips, maps and newspapers.

A selection of the best graduation projects by students from the Linz Art University offers museum visitors an opportunity to take a closer look at current art production in the city during one month.

In conjunction with the Lentos Museum's notable collection of photographs, photography will also play a significant role in the museum's special exhibitions. In the summer of 2005 the museum presents a major exhibition of the work of the internationally renowned photography artist Massimo Vitali.

Now for the second time, the basement of the Lentos Art Museum will be one of the venues for the renowned Ars Electronica Festival.

Initiated by the Lentos Art Museum in cooperation with the Department of Experimental Design at the Art University Linz, during the study year 2004/2005 a group of students developed proposals for a vibrant use of the public zones around Lentos.

The subversion of signs from Marcel Duchamp to Prada Meinhof.
A thematic exhibition on the disturbing reinterpretation of powerfully effective images in art, popular culture, political agitation and advertising."Culture Jamming" is an aesthetic strategy of civil disobedience which has been used increasingly frequently not only in Pop and Art, but also in political activism over the last two decades.

With his extensive photographic project Paul Kranzler (born 1979 in Linz) documents the life of his neighbour in a substandard house in Linz. The central theme of the project is a person's loss of control as he is no longer able to afford the standard of living of middle-class society. The pictures are stark, yet compassionate at the same time, convincingly continuing the great tradition of social realism in photography into the 21st century.

Corresponding thematically to the Paul Kranzler exhibition, there is a show of series of works by six Austrian artists: Heinz Cibulka, Elisabeth Czihak/Walter Ebenhofer, Heinz Grosskopf, Leo Kandl, Wolfgang Pavlik. The exhibition centers around the search for traces of living and haunting milieu studies. A video work by Ricarda Denzer ("TÜR Vierzehn - reading in absence") augments the photographic views of life worlds.

Parallel States is the title of two interconnected video installations shown by Monika Oechsler.

The new Lentos collection presentation shows exclusively works by women artists. Limited to the museum's own collection and the link to the publicity line for the Lentos opening, it is clear that this is not a(nother) 'womens's exhibition' but a look at the museums's own holdings.

The self, others, family, present, wishes, art, security, esposedness, the personal, the political, the poetic – in her show at Lentos, Austrian artist Uli Aigner brings together the themes running through her work with a remarkable wealth of media and materials, in a room-related installation of large-scale drawings combined with a new series of objects. You enter the room, and it shimmers in front of you – form and colour. Decoding topic and meaning can be approached iconographically.

For the first time, Lentos will be taking part this year in the festival that brings a throng of experts, fans, art managers, computer aficionados, writers on art and artists to Linz every year.

The acclaimed British artist (born 1971) creates a work specifically for Linz, which ties into previous investigations in his work. He links the (empty) interior space of the Linz penitentiary with the museum space using a live audiovisual transmission. Partial views and the coherent backdrop of noise turn the rooms in Lentos into a trail through the prison.

This collection, which comes from close friends of the artist and was donated to Lentos in 2003, concentrates specifically on the multifaceted work of Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. Ten sculptures and crafted objects, seven drawings and nineteen print graphic works (lithographs/woodcuts/etchings) convey a characteristic insight into an oeuvre ranging over half a century.

Real or illusion – replica or reality? This core question of every media-theoretical discussion is the starting point for Deutsch and Schimek's extensive project, in the framework of which the two works now presented at Lentos were created. A collection of pictures on the theme of light from the most diverse fields of the history of art and science, in conjunction with digital photos, illuminates the relationship of reality and replica. All the pictures are categorized in a digital image database and accessible in the exhibition on CD-ROM. A selection of the pictures is arranged thematically and associatively in the form of computer prints presented on ten lighted tables.

Based on 200 paintings and sculptures, characteristic drawings and graphic works, and several suites of pictures from the most important Parisian photographers, a charged field marked by great figures and influential impulses opens up in the confrontation between representatives of classical modernism who were still alive at that time and the avant-garde of that era.

With a representative selection of highlights from the collection, the former New Gallery introduces a new era in the Lentos Museum of Modern Art. "Avant-Garde and Tradition", as the comprehensive survey exhibition is entitled, provides insight into the valuable holdings of the internationally renowned museum of modern art.

From 1976 to the present, the collector couple Mag. Maria and Mag. Gerald Fischer-Colbrie have donated eighty art works to the New Gallery of the City of Linz, now the Lentos Modern Art Museum. For the first time, a cross-section of about fifty works in presented in an exhibition, which highlights the specific facets of this private foundation along with the general tone of patronage activities on behalf of the public interested in art.

The "Highlights of Photography", which are presented in the basement in one of the Graphics Rooms, offer a cross-section through 150 years of the history of photography.

Thanks to Wolfgang Gurlitt, the Lentos Modern Art Museum holds nearly 600 works by Alfred Kubin. These cover all the techniques used by the artist and include books illustrated by Kubin, in addition to one-of-a-kind graphic works, mixed techniques and portfolio works.

Parallel to the opening exhibition, "Masterpieces of Graphic Art" are shown in the basement of the new art museum with a selection of twenty of the most beautiful and important watercolors, drawings and print graphic works of the collection, including works by Alechinsky, Baselitz, Blais, Chillida, Christo, Lassnig, Lee, Mangold, Pasmore, Picasso, Pichler, Rainer, Tàpies and Zechyr.

On the occasion of the festival Crossing Europe 2021, Bernd Oppl is the Featured Artist at Lentos Kunstmuseum Linz. The spatial narratives and objects created by Bernd Oppl are both technical and cold and sensuous at once – they captivate with their precise and elaborate execution, but simultaneously make us aware of our perspectives on space, media, and perception, thus also constituting an examination of our own nature.