Total View

Gerhard Rühm has always worked as a writer, musician and artist on the edge of each of these disciplines and has made a decisive contribution to their development. When he composes language as music, collages words as pictures, or puts writing to the crucial test as drawings, his lines and sign systems set out his trails of thought.

Rühm co-founded the Vienna Group, whose significance can hardly be overestimated. Since the early 1950s, he has created an overall body of work that is difficult to take in all at once. For the very first time, this exhibition reveals a total view of the extremely diverse work of the great Austrian multiple talent. “Now” is one of the key notions in his extensive oeuvre. Signs of the present are everywhere! Each encounter with a picture, each exploration of a text or notion, each confrontation with music can be regarded as an experience of the moment which is marked by other emotional and situational components. These he analyses and provokes: “At the moment of reading, which word ‘now’ is now?”

Curated by Roman Grabner