Contemporary art
Since the 1980s Austria has become part of the international art world, with new museums in Vienna and Graz. Maria Lassnig, Franz West and Erwin Wurm have given Austrian art new faces, and the question of the art looted in the Nazi era has transformed the museums.
In the 1980s painting returned with the Neue Wilde, such as Siegfried Anzinger and Hubert Schmalix, and Maria Lassnig, who had worked for decades in Paris and New York, became a professor in Vienna. Her body-awareness paintings, in which she paints how the body feels rather than how it looks, made her a model for younger artists. Franz West created sculptures that viewers were meant to wear or sit on.
Erwin Wurm became internationally known for his One Minute Sculptures, in which people themselves become sculptures for a minute through absurd poses with everyday objects. Artists such as Heimo Zobernig, Brigitte Kowanz, Elke Silvia Krystufek and the group Gelatin have worked with installation, light, video and performance. In architecture Coop Himmelb(l)au achieved international impact with Deconstructivism.
At the same time coming to terms with the Nazi era became a central issue. The debate about Federal President Kurt Waldheim’s past in 1986 opened the question of Austria’s complicity, and after Schiele’s Portrait of Wally was seized in New York in 1998 a law on the return of looted art was passed. Klimt’s portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer was returned in 2006 to the family’s heirs. Rachel Whiteread’s memorial on the Judenplatz in Vienna was unveiled in 2000.