VIENNA.- After more than twelve years of conception, planning and construction, the MQ Libelle on the roof of the Leopold Museum was inaugurated in 2020. It represents the first architectural addition to the MuseumsQuartier (MQ). 25 meters above street level, the viewing platform on the museum’s roof affords stunning views of Vienna’s inner city and the splendid buildings along the Ringstraße. The terrace landscape, for which the architects Laurids (*1941) and Manfred Ortner (*1943) cooperated with the internationally renowned artists Brigitte Kowanz (1957–2022) and Eva Schlegel (*1960), can be accessed for free, provides an event location and meeting place, and represents a widely visible landmark.

“Celebrating the fifth anniversary of the inauguration of the MQ Libelle in 2020, the exhibition Kowanz. Ortner. Schlegel highlights the artistic intentions and congenial interaction of the installation’s protagonists: Brigitte Kowanz, Eva Schlegel as well as the architects Laurids and Manfred Ortner.” -- Dominik Papst, curator of the exhibition

In 1986, the architectural office of the Ortner brothers won the competition for the erec- tion of the MuseumsQuartier in Vienna, the largest cultural construction of the Second Republic. Today, it is frequented by more than five million visitors a year, and is among the biggest art and cultural areas in Europe. From the beginning, Ortner & Ortner, who planned the Leopold Museum, the Kunsthalle Wien and the mumok – Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, had a floating, futurist platform in mind for the extension. Their work process was accompanied by impressive, large-format chalk drawings which are shown in Vienna for the first time to mark the MQ Libelle’s five-year anniversary. The drawings afford valuable insights into the world of imagination of the two Linz-born State Prize winners.

The jubilee further provides the opportunity for the first presentation in Austria of two temporary, extensive installations by Brigitte Kowanz (Expo Line, 2020) and Eva Schlegel (Welle der Libelle, 2025) in the Upper Atrium of the Leopold Museum (level 0). The works enter into a symbiotic interaction with the two interventions by the artists on the roof of the museum, as well as with Ortner & Ortner’s generous architecture. Through their work, Kowanz and Schlegel allow for the architects’ spatial and light structure to be per- ceived in a new way.

CURATOR: Dominik Papst

BRIGITTE KOWANZ, EXPO LINE, 2020

The Viennese artist Brigitte Kowanz initially studied at the University of Applied Arts Vienna (1975–1980). From the mid-1980s, she chose light as her key design medium. In her role as professor of transmedial art at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, which she held from 1997, she shaped entire generations of artists for more than two decades. A State Prize laureate (2009) and participant in the Venice Biennale (1984, 2017), the artist, who died in 2022, is among the most eminent exponents of conceptual and media art in the world.

“When it comes to light, I am interested in its transparency and fleetingness, as well as in the way it expands into a space. Though not really tangible itself, it renders everything visible.” -- Brigitte Kowanz

In terms of their shape, size and structure, the three monumental Light Circles by Brigitte Kowanz on the roof of the Leopold Museum mirror the curves of Ortner & Ortner’s triax- ial MQ Libelle pavilion. The circles, mounted on slanted supports, mark a dynamic, widely visible symbol within the cityscape. Their appearance changes depending on whether it is day or night, conveying either a sense of materiality or immateriality. The white neon light invests the installation with a sublime aura, making the circles look as though they were hovering weightlessly above the baroque facade of the former royal stables.

In the work Expo Line – which Kowanz originally created for the Austrian pavilion at the Expo 2020 in Dubai – the “infinite form” inherent in the Light Circles dissolves into verticality and sculpturality. At the Leopold Museum, where this eight-meter-tall light installation is shown for the first time in Austria, the work appears in a new context. Entering into a dia- logue with the atrium’s generous stone cubature, the trail of light can be experienced in a new way in its unencumbered gestural grace and multi-perspectivity. Thus, Expo Line opens up new perspectives of perception, also in terms of the surrounding architecture’s light and spatial structure.

“The encounter between the ascending line of Expo Line and the Light Circles hover- ing above the building furnishes a poetical field of tension between the clear, rational architecture of the museum and its extension into the urban space – between interior and exterior, space and drawing, construction and gesture, perception and idea.” Adrian Kowanz, director of the ESTATE BRIGITTE KOWANZ (2025)

Kowanz generated the poetical lure and power of realization central to her art via the poles of light and shadow, materiality and ephemerality, expansion and consolidation, etc. This went hand in hand with conceptual clarity and precision in her use of media technology. The pioneer of media art regarded light as constitutive of any form of visual “realization, making things visible and perceptible”. In the case of Expo Line, light manifests, beyond language and codes, via its universal, transcendental nature.

EVA SCHLEGEL, WELLE DER LIBELLE, 2025

Eva Schlegel is among the most prominent contemporary Austrian media artists. Born in 1960 in Hall in Tyrol, the grad- uate of the University of Applied Arts Vienna (1979–1985) taught from 1997 to 2006 as professor of art and photogra- phy at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts. Her works featured in the Venice Biennale in 1988 and 1995, and were presented in over 80 solo exhibitions in Austria and abroad. In 2011, she acted as commissioner in charge of the Austrian pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale.

“Space and its manifold manifestations are the central theme of my work. Through various experiments, materials and concepts, I try to make my viewers aware of – and alter – their perception of space.” -- Eva Schlegel (2025)

Between 2011 and 2020, Schlegel developed the concept for a loosely folded veil for the 94-meter-long glazed shell of the MQ Libelle. Titled veiled, the work consists of a grid made up of 2.4 million individual white dots. The circles of different sizes were etched into the glass surface, enveloping the elegantly curved, over four-meter-high main body of the MQ Libelle with a veil of varying density. Depending on the incidence of light, her work in- vests the pavilion with its shimmering surface, which is at times reminiscent of the gleam- ing wings of a dragonfly.

With her temporary spatial installation, created especially for the Leopold Museum, Welle der Libelle, Eva Schlegel transferred the veil motif into the interior of the museum and into the three-dimensional sphere. Nearly 1,100 strings with a total of 3.5 million shimmering silvery aluminum spheres form a semi-transparent curtain, 180 square meters in size and weighing in excess of 400 kilograms, which extends into the depth of the atrium in a wave- like manner. The 19-meter-long strings convey a sense of lightness which enters into a di- alogue with the museum’s imposing stone cubature, opening up new perspectives of the building via the circular mirror on the floor.

The artist deliberately sustains the aspect of tension that is produced by a veiling curtain, by the synchronicity of revealing and concealing. Rendering these poles spatially perceptible in their reciprocal contingencies, she uses the grid of dots of varying density to shift the attention from the image motif to the process of perception: How do I perceive? What do I perceive? How does perception lead to realization?

LAURIDS AND MANFRED ORTNER, DRAWINGS, 1986–2025

“Our oeuvre is shaped by an increasing awareness of the urban space. Much in keeping with this, the MQ Libelle, too, appears like a space capsule, a model of consciousness- expanding architecture.” -- Laurids Ortner (2025)

Creating new, immersive spaces of experience, while using a minimum of technological means, has always been the aim of the artists’ collective Haus-Rucker-Co, which was founded by Laurids Ortner, Günter Zamp Kelp and Klaus Pinter in 1967 and was joined by Manfred Ortner in 1971. Their spectacular public projects – geared towards shifting and ex- panding the limits of perception of urban spaces in a playful manner and with broad impact – were all resounding successes. The collective opened up studios in Düsseldorf and New York as early as 1970, and prominently featured in the documenta 5, 6 and 8 exhibitions in 1972, 1977 and 1987 in Kassel.

Inhabitable, air-filled plastic bubbles, which can be attached to facades and roofs like space capsules, as well as the installation Nike in Linz (1977), epitomize the architectural utopias, expanding space and consciousness, of Haus-Rucker-Co of the 1960s/70s. Ortner & Ortner – who from 1987 operate architectural offices in Düsseldorf, Vienna, Berlin and Cologne – seamlessly followed on from this with the MQ Libelle. First designs for this installation date back to 2007. In 2014, the idea for the project, realized by Ortner & Ortner from 2011 in coop- eration with Brigitte Kowanz and Eva Schlegel, was first presented to the public.

The futuristic-looking MQ Libelle [Libelle = German for dragonfly], measuring nearly 30 me- ters long and over four meters tall, landed in 2020 on the 900-square-meter roof garden of the Leopold Museum. Laurids Ortner describes it as a “shimmering, glistening, airy and transparent” being which appears to hover weightlessly above the baroque roof landscape and the stone cubature of the museums in the main courtyard of the MuseumsQuartier. In their atmospheric, large-format chalk drawings, Laurids and Manfred Ortner condensed this vision into independent artworks which feature at the heart of this jubilee exhibition.

The series of drawings for Blue Disk – one of many, provisional architecture interventions by Haus-Rucker-Co from the 1980s – occupies an equally important role in the graphic oeuvre of Laurids and Manfred Ortner. It is also shown for the first time in Austria in the exhibition. The drawings accompanying the projects Blue Disc (1986), MQ Libelle (2010, 2020) as well as the latest series, titled Dachstein View (2024/25), span a period of 40 years. What they have in common is the vision of an architecture that effects subtle shifts in the perception of its viewers, sensually condensing ostensibly familiar structures and landscapes to allow us to experience them in a new way.