Study Center

The Generali Foundation's library currently comprises around 16,620 monographs, exhibition catalogs, relevant professional literature and international art journals. The focus is on the artists in the collection and the exhibitions realized by the Generali Foundation since 1989.

A broad overview of current art developments since the 1960s is offered, with a special focus on contemporary art, key thematic emphases, art theories, and discourses. The holdings are constantly being expanded. Current, important and rare historical publications are acquired selectively. For this purpose, we are in active exchange with internationally renowned art institutions and in contact with specialized bookstores and archives.

The media library consists of two visitor terminals where films and videos from the collection as well as recordings of events related to exhibitions of the Generali Foundation in Vienna can be viewed. The quiet reading room offers sufficient space for undisturbed work.

With the extravagant Franz West Lounge, another space is available. Franz West expanded the concept of sculpture with the fitting pieces he developed in the 1970s, which are meant to be handled, to be put on the body like prostheses, and for him "visualize neuroses." Starting in the late 1980s, he designed furniture sculptures, which for him only become art when you sit on them. For Documenta IX in Kassel (1992), the artist designed the open-air cinema with metal benches over which he laid large, heavy oriental carpets - an allusion to the Viennese School of psychoanalysis and the central role of the divan in Sigmund Freund's work. Collaboration with fellow artists was a matter of course for him. On the occasion of the awarding of the Generali Foundation Sculpture Prize (1993) to him, he designed an entertainment program ("Divertissement") for the event space with an installation of seating and table furniture, live music and readings. In 1996, together with Heimo Zobernig (tables), Peter Kogler (fabric design) and Marcus Geiger (color selection), he designed the furnishings for the former Habig business premises, Vienna 4, which became the art café Restaurant Brasserie Engländer on the initiative of the Generali Foundation and no longer exists today. The ensemble of this design furniture from the former art café in Vienna finds a new use in the Franz West Lounge in the Generali Foundation Study Center in the Rupertinum in the Museum der Moderne Salzburg and invites to linger.