In its retrospective on Gerhard Rühm in the autumn of 2017, the Kunstforum Wien is presenting one of the original interdisciplinary artists.

Born in Vienna in 1930, the composer, pianist, performer, man of letters, and visual artist now lives in Cologne. Rühm is an artist comfortable in a variety of individual disciplines long before the terms “crossover” and “intermedia” became prevalent in art. In the intervening space between word and image, language and music, the written word and the drawing, Rühm continually seeks to expand media-based forms of expression, disrupting habitual modes of perception in ways that are as conceptual as they are humorous.

The catalogue accompanying the show contains an extensive section of images, three essays from (linguistic) philosophical and art historical perspectives, as well as an interview with the artist, all of which reveal the multiple facets of Rühm’s trailblazing body of work.