Description

• Can a corporate exhibition venue and museum that is run as a sponsoring instrument and financed by the private sector play a special role and what are its specific tasks? For nearly twenty years now, the Generali Foundation has pursued its own concentrated and consistent program, making an unmistakable and essential contribution to the production and reception of critical art. Research for the exhibitions has laid the cornerstone for the Generali Foundation Collection, which is now seen as one of the best collections of discursive and conceptual art from the 1960s to the present.
  This book tells the history of the Vienna-based Generali Foundation - from the first exhibitions with commissioned works in a multifunctional office that served as an exhibition space to the large thematic exhibitions and retrospective solo shows in the exhibition building opened in 1995. With its scholarly work on artists of the 1960s and 1970s, and its much-discussed exhibitions on contemporary subjects, the Generali Foundation has become an established and internationally respected location for conceptual, cross-media, and critical art.
  Artists including VALIE EXPORT, Harun Farocki, Dan Graham, Sanja Ivekovic, Mary Kelly, Edward Krasinski, Gordon Matta-Clark, Gustav Metzger, Walter Pichler, Martha Rosler, Adrian Piper, and Allan Sekula have all presented their work at the Generali Foundation - many of them for the very first time in such a comprehensive form. Commissioned works by artists such as Maria Eichhorn, Andrea Fraser, Hans Haacke, Dorit Margreiter, Mathias Poledna, Marjetica Potrc, and Heimo Zobernig have been produced for the Generali Foundation. Major exhibitions that have had long-term influence include Things we don’t understand, one of the Foundation’s guest-curated projects, and also White Cube / Black Box, RE-PLAY on the beginnings of international media art, and vivências with conceptual art from Latin America.
  This book presents a comprehensive overview of Generali Foundation exhibitions, including many photographs and texts, and it also addresses detailed issues. It includes a conversation between Sabine Breitwieser, the long-serving director of the Generali Foundation, and the art critic Sabeth Buchmann, in which they reflect on the context and genesis of the program. Similarly to the collection catalogue, which was published in 2003, this book is a record of the status quo, a chronology of the "collected" exhibitions, events, and publications, and thus also of all the artists, critics, and scholars who have been involved in the Foundation’s work in many different ways.