Modernism as a Ruin

The exhibition at the Generali Foundation, Vienna (June – September 2009) focuses on artists’ responses to Modernism’s attempts from the start of the 20th century to design a more human and contemporary society. What has become of this utopia? The show features the formal skepticism of late modernists, including works by Dan Graham, Robert Smithson, Gordon Matta-Clark and Isa Genzken, together with works from a later generation of artists such as Giuseppe Gabellone, Cyprien Gaillard, Florian Pumhösl, Jeroen de Rijke and Willem de Rooij, and Rob Voerman who mine the failed utopian models for recuperative possibilities.