Changes

Sam Gilliam, who recently passed away (1933–2022), is seen as an important innovator in postwar painting in the USA. He was greatly influenced by the Washington Color School and in 1972 he participated in the group exhibition curated by Walter Hopps for the US pavilion at the Venice Biennale. He was the first Black artist to represent the USA there. He identified the key to his artistic practice in “a sense of the importance of process, of change, of the importance of difference itself, a freedom to take command and work from one’s own ideas.” The title of his work Change (1970), which is in the mumok collection, refers to the fact that Gilliam’s “drape paintings,” of which this work is an example, are hung without frames from the ceiling and can look very different depending on the nature of the space where they are shown.

The collection show Changes—the title refers to Gilliam’s work and is intentionally in the plural—focuses on recent acquisitions to the collection, with works by Leidy Churchman, János Fájo, Philipp Fleischmann, Birke Gorm, Jojo Gronostay, Frida Orupabo, and Emily Wardill, and other works from the collection that have not yet been shown at mumok, and confronts these with older holdings which can thus be seen afresh.

Artists: Monika Baer, Peter Baum, Ştefan Bertalan, Christo, Leidy Churchman, Hanne Darboven, Marcel Duchamp, Don Eddy, János Fajó, Werner Feiersinger, Philipp Fleischmann, Isa Genzken, Sam Gilliam, Domenico Gnoli, Sayre Gomez, Birke Gorm, Julian Göthe, Dan Graham, Renée Green, Jojo Gronostay, Hans Haacke, Maria Hahnenkamp, Candida Höfer, Tess Jaray, Valerie Jaudon, Hildegard Joos, Annette Kelm, Julije Knifer, Jutta Koether, Willi Kopf, Jiří Kovanda, Tetsumi Kudo, Louise Lawler, Carolyn Lazard, Dorit Margreiter, Dóra Maurer, Ulrike Müller, Oswald Oberhuber, Claes Oldenburg, Henrik Olesen, Yoko Ono, Frida Orupabo, Alicia Penalba, Barbara Pflaum, Walter Pichler, Charlotte Posenenske, Josephine Pryde, Florian Pumhösl, Eileen Quinlan, Robert Rauschenberg, Mieko Shiomi, Daniel Spoerri, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Rosemarie Trockel, Doru Tulcan, Josip Vaništa, Emily Wardill, Lois Weinberger, Lawrence Weiner, Ray Yoshida

Exhibition display: Nadim Vardag
Curated by Naoko Kaltschmidt

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