We took a tram out the the MuseumsQuartier to visit the MUMOK on the understanding we would be treated to some expressionism. Whatever expressionist works they have remained a tease since that day they remained in the vault. Instead we found ourselves walking around an Adam Pendleton exhibition Blackness, White, and Light. I have little to say about it, and having read some of the exhibition text I had to wonder if anyone anywhere had anything worth saying about it.
There was a room that formed part of the exhibition, that I did not enter, but have been reliably informed involved being bombarded with an upsetting and overwhelming stream of sound and images. Leaving the room so discombobulated gave the exhibition an entirely different hue, but I’m pretty certain you could have walked out into the Museum of Bad Art and found the effect similarly transformative.
There were also two floors showcasing the work of Elizabeth Wild, an Austrian collage artist who was at work throughout her life, but only received real art world recognition in her 90s. A lot of time passed between her studying at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and that eventual success. It was a life that involved fleeing unpleasant regimes and dictatorships at certain key junctures. The collages came late in her creative practice but she produced one a day, so there was an entire floor full of them. You might have already seen one of her collages on the London tube.
