This richly illustrated publication reviews the additions to the Generali Foundation collection made under Sabine Folie's leadership between 2008 and 2014.
From 2008 to 2014 Sabine Folie was the director of the Generali Foundation—more than twenty-years after (plus que 20 ans après) the collection and exhibition venue formed in 1988. She helped establish the institution's reputation for generating new critical discussion on contemporary art through revisiting modernism. Reviewing the collection's relation to recent art-historical discourse, the essays selected for the publication, written by theorists and artists, reflect on themes in contemporary art including linguistic devices, the dismantling of representation and the reorganization of pictorial space, the changing roles of the artist and the museum throughout modernity, the relationship between the subject and the environment under conditions of globalization and postcolonialism, and the artistic processing of history and the production of memorial culture.
The artworks in the Generali Foundation, some of which have never been exhibited before, are organized here as an exhibition in book form. Moreover, a key focus of both artistic production and the collection during Folie's directorship was on “the book” as work and medium. The book is not only a topical medium that historicizes Conceptual art, but also a means to place the interests of this collection in focus—namely, revisions of modernity in the context of the contemporary proliferation of the reproduced image and modes of display.
Edited by Sabine Folie.
Texts by Anna Sigrídur Arnar, Christa Blümlinger, Georges Didi-Huberman, Sabine Folie, Rachel Haidu, Tom Holert, Gabriele Mackert, Michael Newman, Elisabeth von Samsonow.
Graphic design: MVD Austria.
Cover art work: Klaus Scherübel.
