29/02/24 till 05/05/24
Vienna, held in celebration of the collection’s twentieth anniversary. The corporate collection was founded by the leading Austrian electricity company VERBUND in 2004 and holds around one thousand works by two hundred artists. The catalogues released by its publishing arm have given a significant boost to some of the artists’ careers. The show includes new acquisitions that will be presented in Austria for the first time.
The large bodies of work by artists such as Cindy Sherman, Francesca Woodman, Birgit Jürgenssen, and Renate Bertlmann compiled in keeping with VERBUND COLLECTION’s maxim “depth instead of breadth” make up the first part of the exhibition. Sherman is presented side by side with contemporaries like Martha Wilson and younger artists like Aneta Grzeszykowska, who reenacted Sherman’s famous black-and-white series Untitled Film Stills in color. They are followed by works of the feminist avant-garde of the 1970s that deal with the reduction of women to the roles of housewife, wife, and mother, the use of the female body, and female sexuality. mehr
The term feminist avant-garde was coined by VERBUND COLLECTION’s founding director Gabriele Schor in 2007 to honor the pioneering work of these artists. She successfully positioned them in the art-historical canon with an exhibition that toured throughout Europe for ten years. Through this focus on in-depth collecting, Schor secured VERBUND COLLECTION’s singular status.