20 Years of the VERBUND COLLECTION

The company collection was established in 2004 by VERBUND, Austria’s leading power company, and comprises around 1,000 works by 200 artists. The 15 issued publications of the collection had a big impact on promoting the careers of a number of female artists. This exhibition shows numerous new acquisitions, which are on display for the first time in Austria.

Title image: Aneta Grzeszykowska: Untitled Film Stills, 2006
© 2023 Aneta Grzeszykowska / Courtesy of the artist and Raster Gallery, Warsaw / VERBUND COLLECTION, Vienna
Acquired 2008

There follow works from the Feminist Avant-Garde of the 1970s. For the first time in the history of art, these pioneering women succeeded in creating a completely new “image of the woman”. The female body escaped from a centuries-old object status and appeared as the subject, as the actor.

The term “feminist avant-garde” was coined by founding director Gabriele Schor in 2007 in order to honour the pioneering work of these female artists and successfully positioned them in the canon of art history with a ten-year European exhibition tour. Through this in-depth focus, Schor managed to built up a unique selling point for the VERBUND COLLECTION.

Further artistic positions

Against the background of the spatialisation of art in the 1970s, another area is devoted to those works that deal with the conceptual, poetic and psychological perception of spaces and places. Gordon Matta-Clark saws a house in two, tilts one half a few degrees and thus creates his “anarchitecture” as a criticism of conventional architecture. David Wojnarowicz poetically links his life in New York with that of the French poet Arthur Rimbaud. And Ernesto Neto, based on Sigmund Freud’s interpretation of dreams, creates a psychologically charged space, in which a doll sits in a rocking chair and is secretly connected with a super-ego outside the cage.

The anniversary exhibition presents new acquisitions in the context of “Gender, Identity & Diversity”, works that have never been seen in Austria before. Artists create spaces of memory, such as South African-born Kganye Lebohang, who looks at her relationship with her deceased mother through photo montages, or Alexander Ugay, who was born in Kazakhstan. Starting from the Korean diaspora, he searches for traces of his ancestors using analogue and AI photographs. With her large collages, the Norwegian-Nigerian artist Frida Orupabo creates scenes covering topics such as colonial history, slavery, racism and sexism. Zanele Muholi identifies as non-binary and advocates actively for LGBTQIA+ rights in South Africa. Muholi’s staged self-portraits criticise the Eurocentric view of the Black body. Sin Wai Kin deconstructs and reconstructs social narratives and embodies four non-binary identities of a fictitious boygroup with the video “It’s Always You”.