Breaking Down Walls!
The Collections

The year 2024 brought major anniversaries for the Museum der Moderne Salzburg and the Generali Foundation. Twenty years earlier, the extraordinary site of the Museum on the Mönchsberg had been opened and become a new landmark for the State and City of Salzburg. In 2014 one of Austria’s most significant private art collections with an international focus, the Generali Foundation Collection, came to Salzburg on permanent loan and has since then remained a productive stakeholder at the Museum.

To mark these anniversaries, the Museum der Moderne Salzburg in cooperation with the Generali Foundation was presenting a series of exhibitions that brought together the outstanding art collections that are preserved at the Museum der Moderne Salzburg and are the subject of research: the Generali Foundation Collection, the Museum’s own holdings, the Federal Photography Collection, and the Salzburg State Collection. The spectrum ranged from works of Classical Modernism to new media, from work with historical references to work that thematizes the pressing issues of our day. What connects these collections? What social and cultural perspectives does this artistic spectrum open up? These were questions that have been addressed by the exhibition series, which was founded on two basic motifs: The social space and play.

The first installment of the exhibition considered a development (the spatial turn) where space, or rather the concept of space, has special status as a tool for analysis. The focus here was not only on static geometric space, but on space as a phenomenon designed, experienced, and coded by humans. This shift of meaning to a socially and culturally shaped construct has its roots not only in the increasing mobility of our society, but in forced migration, territorial conflicts, and changes in the climate. The exhibition shed a light on the interdependence of space, body, and media. It explored interfaces, interspaces, and transitional spaces and expanded the museum space with spaces for action, experience, and memory.

With works by
Annemarie Avramidis, Josef Bauer, Günter Brus, Georgia Creimer, Yan Duyvendak, Georg Eisler, Werner Feiersinger, Sylvie Fleury, Seiichi Furuya, Gelitin, George Grosz, Renée Green, Ulrike Grossart, Manfred Grübl, Wolfgang Herzig, Kathi Hofer, Martha Jungwirth, Franz Kapfer, Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka, Käthe Kollwitz, Alfred Kubin, Branko Lenart, Luiza Margan, Manon, Kurt Mayer, Tim Noble and Sue Webster, Klaus Pamminger, Marjetica Potrc, Dargo J. Prelog, Simona Reisch, Annerose Riedl, Martha Rosler, Gregor Sailer, Egon Schiele, Markus Schinwald, Thomas Stimm, Margherita Spiluttini, Martin Walde, Lois Weinberger, Werkstatt Rixdorfer Drucke, Erwin Wurm