TIME RACE From the dawn of the late 1960s to the present. Positions on architecture, form, and time. May 23 and 24, 2025 Studio Schülke

Time, like space and form, serves to describe what happens in the world. And: "Not everything is possible at all times," wrote Heinrich Wölfflin in 1915, the very year that Kazimir Malevich exhibited the famous "Black Square," which symbolized the end and new beginning in art, at the Dobytčina Gallery in Petrograd.

Today, many of us still believe that works of art should be never seen before creations and not merely exceptional. This idea probably stems from our awareness of striking positions in art history that emerged during major upheavals or an atmosphere of renewal. In the contemporary and postmodern movements that followed the avant-gardes and modernism, however, the new thing was, that in a broad movement everything became possible – “anything goes”. Contemporary art and Postmodernism, as a whole, is therefore new and unique.

But all movements were concerned with the present, with time, embedded in the past and the future. The question is whether art was seen as a movement “against time" or “with time" or defined itself as such.

In our exhibition TIME RACE, we present works that, driven by a spirit of criticism of the then-present postwar modernism, turned against the times; works that found their foundation in the spirit of optimism of the time and, so to speak, moved with the times; and works that, given the artists' year of birth, cannot be considered avant-garde or the result of a spirit of optimism at all. This, of course, does not diminish their value, for the positions presented always point beyond themselves and reflect the events of their time.

ARTISTS: Walter Michael Pühringer (ZÜND-UP) / Gottfried Hoellwarth / Christian Eisenberger / Bettina Schülke / Begi Guggenheim / Patryck Chan /

CURATED BY: Andreas Schlichtner