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.Exhibition: Kunstforum Wien, Vienna, 4.10.2017–28.1.2018PETER WEIBEL (* 1944, Odessa) is an internationally known media and conceptual artist, curator, and art and media theoretician. Since the 1960s his work has firmly regarded artistic creativity as an open-ended field of activity. He was head of the ZKM, Karlsruhe until 2020. Since 2017 he has been director of the Peter Weibel Research Institute for Digital Culture at the Universität für angewandte Kunst in Vienna.