The exhibition with works of Austrian contemporary artists offers an overview of current variant conceptions of the grotesque. Across genres, works from the realms of painting, photography, installation, performance art, film and video are on show.

The grotesque unites two contrary aspects, on the one hand humour and the comical or absurd, on the other hand, it usually also includes the tragical, the eerie and the ugly. It links the horrible with the comical, the
monstrous with the clown-like, horror with comedy, fright with laughter, disgust with attraction. It is the allegorical anti-ideal which contradicts the prevalent standards of taste. As aesthetical objection against the common idea of beauty and the ideal, it is per se provocative and subversive.

The human body whose proportions are distorted, whose organs are amputated, isolated, multiplied, dis- and relocated or added, it´s borders are shifted and the bodily unit is dissolved, always serves as reference for and target of criticism. Deformations and re-combinations of body parts are prevalent in variant grotesque blueprints, whereas human, animal, plant as well as totally inorganic elements like, for example, crystalline or automatic-mechanical individual parts are added up to something utterly new, to alien units of entities. But also landscapes and architecture can be translated into the grotesque. Sinister and unreal worlds are constructed, which establish laws that contradict our perception of everyday life.