Restless Orders. Sculpture and Human Existence since 1945

Sculpture can give physical form to inner states, charge an everyday object with desire, or make social constraints tangible. What a sculpture can be has changed fundamentally again and again since 1945. Restless Orders spans more than eight decades of artistic renewal and social change.

The exhibition connects the images of humanity in Austrian postwar modernism with the radical experiments of the 1960s and 1970s, in which sculpture expands into space, action, medium and situation. It continues into the contradictory 1980s, when a new culture of commodities and objects meets a stronger turn toward subjective and psychological experience, and from there up to the present. Across these historical constellations, questions of human existence, social, institutional and economic orders, and the relationship between material, environment and complex systems recur.

The exhibition asks how changes in artistic means are connected to the experiences and upheavals of their time. War and reconstruction, the critique of outdated gender roles, or the technologization of everyday life can become impulses to rethink the methods of art as well. Artists intervene in spaces, establish relationships and create situations in which perception and action themselves become the subject of an experiment. They work with bodies and apparatuses, with found objects and natural materials. They join things into spatial structures or set in motion processes that develop their own dynamics. At the center of the exhibition are the inventiveness and urgency with which artists explore and expand the possibilities of sculpture in order to give form to experiences that cannot simply be depicted.

In the exhibition, Austrian and international positions from postwar modernism to the present meet in unfamiliar neighborhoods. Recurring questions link works from different decades and generations. In comparison, it becomes visible how closely a form can be tied to the experiences and conflicts of its time, and why it still moves, unsettles or challenges us today. The comparison opens up the works without dissolving their enigmatic character.

The exhibition builds on the long-standing collecting, research and exhibition activities of the Generali Foundation on the expansion of the sculptural and its social significance. At the same time, it establishes a dialogue with selected works from the museum's collection, which has focal points in Austrian postwar modernism, images of humanity and contemporary positions. What emerges is not a straight line of development, but a history of diverse, at times contradictory answers to the question of how we understand ourselves and our world.

With works by

Robert Adrian X, Joannis Avramidis, Josef Bauer, Mária Bartuszová, Gottfried Bechtold, Josef Dabernig, Maria Eichhorn, Evelyne Egerer, VALIE EXPORT, Judith Fegerl, Werner Feiersinger, Heinz Frank, Marcus Geiger, Isa Genzken, Bruno Gironcoli, Roland Goeschl, Hans Haacke, Bethan Huws, Willi Kopf, Brigitte Kowanz, Sigalit Landau, Sonia Leimer, Ines Lombardi, Christian Lutz, Marianne Maderna, Gordon Matta-Clark, Gustav Metzger, Bruce Nauman, Bernd Oppl, Hermann J. Painitz, Walter Pichler, Josef Pillhofer, Christine Prantauer, Gerwald Rockenschaub, Zbyněk Sekal, Rini Tandon, Andreas Urteil, Manfred Wakolbinger, Lois Weinberger, Franz West, Hannah Wilke, Fritz Wotruba, Erwin Wurm, Heimo Zobernig among others