WIEN.- With this exhibition KUNST HAUS WIEN honours the artist on whose philosophy and artistic principles this institution is largely based. The 20th anniversary of KUNST HAUS WIEN, a museum which unites, under one roof, international temporary exhibitions and the permanent Museum Hundertwasser, offers an occasion for this special exhibition project. For a period of four months, all of KUNST HAUS WIEN is thus devoted to Friedensreich Hundertwasser. The exhibition is on view from July 7 until November 6 2011.

The time is ripe for a renaissance of Friedensreich Hundertwasser, for a comprehensive tribute to this innovative artist and ecological visionary. This biographic and thematic exhibition spotlights significant junctures in his life and work which, taken together, convey an overall impression of Hundertwasser as a person and as an artist and serve as signposts to the intellectual and artistic cosmos of an original thinker and pioneer – a peacemaker between human beings and nature, who placed his art and his life in the service of the green path.

Ideally, the exhibition should be visited in combination with the Museum Hundertwasser, the world’s only museum devoted exclusively to Friedensreich Hundertwasser. Key works by Hundertwasser that have never been shown in Vienna before, and photo series by photographers such as Manfred Bockelmann, Robert Lebeck, Erich Lessing, Elfriede Mejchar, Stefan Moses or Christian Skrein, some of which have never been exhibited until now, are supplemented by a wealth of documentary material, including excerpts from Peter Schamoni’s film “Hundertwasser’s Regentag” and the voices of Hundertwasser’s contemporaries.

In 13 stations, the exhibition takes us on a journey to selected focal points of Hunderwasser’s artistic life: important times in Vienna, Paris, Hamburg, Venice and Japan, the legendary Otto Wagner attic studio on Spiegelgasse in Vienna, Hunderwasser’s artistic actions protesting the rigidity of architecture, the “Regentag” motif as a key to his universe, and finally, New Zealand – his second home and last paradise. Thus, this jubilee exhibition opens up a pathway to a rediscovery of Hundertwasser, whose ideas and pioneering actions are reflected in today’s ecological trends.