Claes Oldenburg (b. 1929, Stockholm, Sweden) has not only been a major artist in Pop Art, Performance Art and Installation Art but, in partnership with Coosje van Bruggen, also a strong influence on art in public spaces with his monumental Large Scale Projects in numerous major cities worldwide. With his humorous and profound depictions of everyday objects he is one of the most important and admired artists since the late 1950s. One central point of reference in Oldenburg’s oeuvre is the industrially produced object—the object as a commodity which, in ever-new metamorphoses of media and form, becomes a conveyor of culture and a symbol of the imagination, desires, and obsessions of the modern world.

Organized by the mumok, this is the largest show ever of Oldenburg’s ground-breaking and emblematic early work of the 1960s. Numerous icons of Pop art are on view in the exhibition, beginning with the installation The Street and its graffiti-inspired depictions of modern life in the big city and continuing to the famous consumer articles of The Store to the spectacular everyday objects of the modern Home: telephone, toilet bowl, bathtub, fan, saw, and light switch. Another chapter is dedicated to Oldenburg’s first designs for the colossal monuments of his consumer objects for public spaces. The exhibition concludes with mumok’s Mouse Museum a walk-in miniature museum in the form of a Geometric Mouse, for which Oldenburg collected 385 objects. With its souvenirs, kitsch objects, and studio models, the Mouse Museum demonstrates the incredible cultural variety—and mysteriousness—of capitalist society. With its reduction to abstract basic figures of formal invention, the Geometric Mouse, a central motif within the artist’s oeuvre, represents a dovetailing of high art and popular culture. It also functions as Oldenburg’s alter ego.

Curator
Achim Hochdörfer

This exhibition, organized by mumok, will travel to the Museum Ludwig in Cologne (June 22–September 30, 2012), the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (October 30, 2012–February 17, 2013), the Museum of Modern Art in New York (April 14–August 5, 2013), and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis (September 13, 2013–January 12, 2014).

A selection of more than 150 works from around the world will cover every creative phase of the artist, retracing Magritte’s artistic career.

Conceived in collaboration with the Tate Liverpool, the exhibition addresses hitherto little-explored aspects of Magritte’s life and artistic activity. It focuses on his use of patterns and recurring objects, the subject of covering and unveiling, visual breaks and eroticism in his oeuvre. On the basis of Magritte’s most important works and early commercial pieces, the exhibition examines the connection between the artist’s paintings and his work for the advertising industry as well as the influence of pop culture. Drawings and collages, rarely shown photographs and films are also on view in the show.

From the mise-en-scène of dresses to supermodels, Vanity presents about two hundred works from the F.C. Gundlach Collection. Landmark photographs as well as unknown pictures from the late 1920s to the present day testify to the suggestive power of fashion photography between innovation and tradition, consumerism and art. F.C. gundlach, a fashion photographer himself, has assembled one of the most comprehensive private collections of photographs in the germanspeaking world. He has never understood fashion photography as veneer, but seen it as a culture’s form of expression mirroring an era’s zeitgeist and view of man in their outward appearance.

With works by Richard Avedon, Lillian Bassman, Cecil Beaton, Sibylle Bergemann, Erwin Blumenfeld, Guy Bourdin, Louise Dahl-Wolfe, Hubs Flöter, Ralph Gibson, F.C. Gundlach, Horst P. Horst, George Hoyningen-Huene, George Hurrell, William Klein, Nick Knight, David LaChapelle, Edgar Leciejewski, Zoe Leonard, Leon Levinstein, Peter Lindbergh, Gjon Mili, Sarah Moon, Armin Morbach, Helmut Newton, Irving Penn, Regina Relang, Kristian Schuller, Melvin Sokolsky, Deborah Turbeville, Yva, Imre von Santho, Wols

Numerous works by Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein, Tom Wesselmann, Robert Indiana and Jim Dine constitute an important emphasis of the mumok permanent collection, which is internationally renowned for its holdings of Pop Art. The extensiveness of the collection will make it possible to place the Claes Oldenburg retrospective into a fitting context.

Together with the protagonists of American Pop Art, the works of their British colleagues, Peter Blake, Richard Hamilton and David Hockney along with the European realisms of the 1960s give us a good idea of the extent to which the fascination with everyday culture had become a broad, international phenomenon. Enormous enlargements (Domenico Gnoli, Raymond Hains), unexpected combinations (Konrad Klapheck) and images that are literally ripped from the street (Mimmo Rotella) celebrate the seeming banalities of our world and at the same time establish a connection to the work of Claes Oldenburg.

Curator
Karola Kraus