The
University of Applied Arts Vienna sheds light on the beginnings of its art collection in the 1980s
17.09.2025
With the exhibition Fernheilung (Distant Healing). The
1980s and Early 1990s Through a Distorted Lens, the Angewandte looks back at the artistic scene in Vienna during the
decade in which its collection was founded: works from the university's milieu at the time, documents and selected loans are
used to create a parcours that highlights important events in the art world, exhibitions, artistic movements and discourses
of the time in their context.
The practices of teachers and students are placed
in the context of the exhibition scene in Vienna as well as in the international trends of the time.
Founded in 1980
by Oswald Oberhuber, the rector at the time, the collection of the University of Applied Arts Vienna sought from the outset
to understand itself in its historical context. Although the collection is assembled according to whim, it has a programmatic
approach that is also made accessible to the public in exhibitions. Firstly, the programme aims to reorder and re-evaluate
the canon of the 20th century. It also deals with the reappraisal of National Socialism, which began very late in Austria.
Finally, it attempts to depict current events and developments in schools from an art-historical perspective.
The exhibition
Fernheilung aims to build on this programme by taking up the logic of the collection: in the way it describes the
body of the collection, emphasises certain aspects, makes corrections and creates new contextualisations. The Angewandte collection
remains true to itself by changing. The exhibition thus creates an image of the collection that is both historical and contemporary.
Through different, conflicting, even contradictory registers of contemporaneity, this image becomes a necessarily distorted
reflection of each viewer's own perspective, values and ways of seeing.
Alongside paradigmatic exhibitions and events
such as Design is Invisible (Forum Design, Linz 1980), Signs, Floods, Signals (Galerie Nächst St. Stephan, Vienna 1984), Dream
and Reality. Vienna 1870–1930 (Künstlerhaus, Vienna 1985), Wittgenstein. The Game of the Unspeakable (Secession, Vienna 1989)
and the symposium The Aesthetic Field (Angewandte, Vienna 1992), developments such as the canonisation of early Viennese Modernism
and the late confrontation with the Nazi past are addressed. The exhibition highlights the failed institutionalisation of
practices of the 1960s and 1970s at the university, media art and Neo-Geo, as well as their turn to institutional critique.
It also traces the intergenerational battle zones and the long road to the internationalisation of the art field in the context
of the University of Applied Arts.
Today, the collection of the University of Applied Arts Vienna comprises numerous
objects from all areas of applied and fine arts of the 20th and 21st centuries, with a particular focus on Viennese Modernism.
These include prints, posters, furniture, textiles, photographs, ceramics, paintings, objects and architectural models by
Fred Adlmüller, Friedrich Berzeviczy-Pallavicini, Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, Josef Hoffmann, Oskar Kokoschka, Anton Kolig, Maria
Lassnig, Victor J. Papanek, Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, Peter Weibel, the Wiener Werkstätte and Viennese Kinetism, as well
as Baroque and cottage industry textiles from historical teaching collections, among others.
Curated by Robert
Müller in dialogue with Helmut Draxler
16. October 2025 – 31. January 2026
Press-Preview:
15 October 2025, 10 h
Opening: 15 October 2025, 18 h
University Gallery Heiligenkreuzerhof, Schönlaterngasse 5
/ Grashofgasse 3, 1010 Vienna
Staircase 8, 1st floor
Opening hours: Wednesday–Saturday, 2:00 p.m.–6:00 p.m.
(closed on public holidays). Free entry
