Until the end of September our collection will focus on Franz West and Rudolf Polanszky.

Since the beginning of the 1970s, the two artists were bound together in friendship, which despite their completely different artistic conceptions, lasted until Franz West’s death. “While West valued position and role, significance and rank, and success was always important, I found the social aspect, the organizational structure in the art world, to be disgusting and repulsive,“ Polanszky states. Their mutual appreciation of art found its expression in a series of collaborative projects. It is also to be mentioned that Franz West owned works by Rudolf Polanszky, which hung in his private residence.

The exhibition concentrates on collages and sculptures from 1980 until today. In the collages, the different artistic intentions are reflected in the most obvious ways: While West cut up the high-gloss world of cheap magazines and advertising brochures, using his aesthetic to quote and turn these into critical comments, Polanszky appears to some extent as a researcher who, using opaque materials and crossed-out schematics, attempts to stimulate our interpretive mechanisms to uncover how they function, or at least give us an idea about them.

The exhibition is rounded out by works from the collection, among them by Siegfried Anzinger, Christian Eisenberger, Herbert Flois, Otto Muehl, Martin Kippenberger, Rita Nowak, Sigmar Polke, Lukas Pusch, Gerhard Richter, Rudolf Schwarzkogler, Miroslav Tichy and VALIE EXPORT.