Systems & Subjects

After the inaugural and highly successful presentation of selected works from the newly acquired Generali Foundation Collection, this exhibition set the stage for inspiring encounters between the various holdings of the museum. For that purpose, we have embarked on research into artworks from the early twentieth century to the present, relating to the overall theme of the exhibition Systems & Subjects. Works have been selected to permit a thematically focused dialogue between the Generali Foundation collection, the museum’s own collection of prints, the MAP collection, and recent donations. The exhibition featured artworks by artists such as Max Beckmann, George Grosz, Karl Rössing, and Max Klinger in interaction with works by Bruno Gironcoli, Harun Farocki, Hans Haacke, Mary Kelly, Július Koller, Anna Oppermann, Allan Sekula, Franz West, Heimo Zobernig, and others.

The origins of the museum, founded in 1983 based on a donation by the art dealer Friedrich Welz, were encountered with a selection from the museum’s print collection. It was a great leap, not only in time, to the new acquisitions of the Generali Foundation collection and recent donations of works by Lynn Hershman Leeson and Andreas Siekmann. Typical modernist works that focus on an image of humanity were juxtaposed with conceptual approaches in art from the 1960s and 1970s. In the works from the 1960s to the present, mostly installations, the subject was considered within the framework of physical, economic, and social systems.

The similarities and differences in some areas between the works were surprising—for example, the passers-by photographed by David Lamelas in 1970 in Milan and George Grosz’s drawings of contemporaries in Ecce Homo (1923). Fetishism in different forms is a discernibly common motif in the works of Bruno Gironcoli, Anna Oppermann, Franz West, and Max Klinger. The drawings by Karl Rössing (1927–1931), an installation by Andreas Siekmann (2001), and conceptual works by Maria Eichhorn (1997–2002) offer very different views of the sociopolitical and economic situation. One basic theme recurs again and again: the status of the subject within social systems, in other words the condition humaine.