With a selection of works from our collection, this exhibition presents different lines of development in painting from the 1950s to the 1970s. It includes works by Josef Albers, Helen Frankenthaler, Roland Goeschl, Ellsworth Kelly, Richard Kriesche, Karel Malich, Agnes Martin, Kenneth Noland, Ad Reinhardt, Helga Philipp, and Zdeněk Sýkora.

The 1950s saw a radical shift and break with tradition in the fundamentals of painting in favor of new media-based forms of art. Key impulses came from minimal art and conceptual art. Their sober principles are reflected in abstract and geometrical painting with its formally reduced compositions and its rejection of narrative and illusionist representation.

At the same time, painting explored its own relationship to space and to perception. In Eastern Europe from the 1960s there was increased reception of constructivist modernism, as a counter to socialist realism and in the course of post-Stalinist liberalization. Analytical trends are seen in contemporary painting in Austria as a sign of its international intentions.