The MUMOK (Museum für Moderne Kunst in German – Museum of Modern Art) is Austria’s largest and most significant museum for contemporary art. Since 2001, it is housed in a futuristic cube designed by architects Ortner & Ortner, right in Vienna’s fabulous Museumsquartier.
The museum is dedicated to art of the 20th and 21st centuries, with collections from classical modernism, nouveau réalisme, fluxus, pop-art and Viennese actionism movements.
First opened in 1962 as the Museum of the 20th Century in the Schweizergarten park of Vienna, today the MUMOK already has its third address and third name. As the collection had grown, in 1979, the museum was provisionally extended by one building – the baroque Palais Liechtenstein. The old and new buildings now went under the joint name: Museum of Modern Art. Only in 2001, the museum moved to the Museumsquartier.
Today, the MUMOKs collection contains over 9,000 works: paintings, sculptures, installations, drawings, graphic works, photos, videos, films but also architectural models and furniture from the first half of the 20th century as well as documentary material specially related to the art of the 60’s of the last century.
A focus of the collection is the Viennese Actionism, the most important Austrian contribution to international avantgarde developments in the Sixties.