TROPHIES. New Acquisitions for the collection of NORDICO Museum

The exhibition TROPHIES. New Acquisitions for the Collection 2011/2012 shows 50 artworks by 18 artists that were purchased on the recommendation of curators Martina Gelsinger and Holger Jagersberger for the City Museum of Linz. The exhibition series TROPHIES take place biennially and shows a living picture of contemporary art in the city of Linz.

The selection of works was not subject to media-specific restrictions, so the artists open their works in various media – sculpture, painting, graphics, video, photography, and performance. The exhibition space itself – Nordico Museum – is a place for thinking about questions of social development and individual processes. The artworks deal with aspects of daily life, embedded in a globalized, engineered and mediatized lifeworld.

Curators Martina Gelsinger and Holger Jagersberger developed new criteria for the expansion of the collection that enabled them to be in stronger relation to the artists. They also attended several workshops and commission works, in order to enrich the artworks in the context of an urban collection in many ways.

The selected artists already have a very close relationship with the city; Linz as birthplace, as place of artistic residence, as working or training center linked to the Art University. The town itself is the protagonist of the action. As director Andrea Bina wrote in his introduction to the exhibition catalogue, the NORDICO City Museum Linz is a meeting place, a place of education where to learn a visual representation of stories in the city. Collecting, preserving, researching, presenting, and mediating are a museum’s basic tasks that help artworks find their destination – the museum is the place where the memory of a society gets materialized. TROPHIES is a very positive example of connection and interaction beetween artists and the world of art institutions, a collaboration that too often is lacking today.

Group show, TROPHIES. New Acquisitions for the collection, NORDICO Stadtmuseum, Linz, through February 23, 2014.