The mumok - Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien is Austria’s most important museum of modernist and contemporary art and an internationally renowned collector and exhibitor. mumok is Austria’s truly comprehensive national collection of contemporary art, with the key task of developing and expanding an inventory of international contemporary art.
Since 2001, mumok has been located within one of Europe’s largest dedicated cultural quarters, the Vienna MuseumsQuartier, which welcomes around four million visitors yearly. The museum has a collection of more than 9,600 works and is the largest museum of contemporary art in Central Europe, with around 200,000 visitors per year. mumok has 4,800 square meters of exhibition galleries, three spacious venues for events, the mumok kino, the library, the café, and also a design shop, all together offering a wide-ranging program for visitors.
mumok provides a focus for recent art history and sets trends in contemporary discourse, presenting solo exhibitions of the works of important and established artists and increasingly also of innovative younger artists. Under the leadership of Karola Kraus, director of mumok since fall 2010, several large major exhibitions are held each year, often in close cooperation with international museums and partners.
The Collection
Our collection ranges from classical modernism, with cubist, futurist, and surrealist works, to the movements of the 1960s and 1970s and the present day. The early twentieth century is represented by paintings and sculptures by Henri Matisse, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Pablo Picasso, and Alberto Giacometti—among many others. The collection includes major works of Pop Art by Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein and important works of Fluxus, conceptual art, and Vienna Actionism. Most recently, the collection has grown to include contemporary film, video, and photography. In the past ten years alone, around 1,500 new acquisitions have been made. Sponsors and corporate partners are committed to continuing mumok’s pioneering collecting activities and play an active part in today’s international artistic trends.
Exhibitions
The museum sees one of its primary goals in the thematic coordination of exhibitions from the collection and special exhibitions, which together will allow for a deeper understanding of the collection while helping to fulfill the task of the museum understood as a platform for dialogue between art history and current art production.
In 2017, mumok is presenting an ambitious program of exhibitions. The first half of the year is particularly shaped by women’s voices. We begin with a new arrangement of the mumok permanent collection, curated by artist Jakob Lena Knebl. Starting in May the touring exhibition “Feminist Avant-garde of the 1970s from the SAMMLUNG VERBUND” will be shown in mumok and a solo exhibition by Martin Beck, one of Austria’s most important contemporary artists.
The year will conclude with two large thematic exhibitions. In the group exhibition “Natural Histories,” invited artists will explore representations of nature with reference to social processes and events from contemporary history. The second exhibition will present one of the key personalities in mumok’s own history to the general public. This time the focus is on collector Wolfgang Hahn, whom mumok has to thank for much of its collections of works of nouveau réalisme, Fluxus, happenings, and conceptual art.
