Missing Link

Founded in 1970 by Angela Hareiter, Otto Kapfinger, and Adolf Krischanitz, the architecture group Missing Link is one of the most important phenomena to appear on Austria’s avant-garde art and architecture scene of the 1970s. With their boundary-breaking and interdisciplinary projects, they looked for the missing links between people, architecture, urbanism, art, and social fabric and enriched the repertoire of architecture with new, experimental concepts. During the decade of its existence, the group produced an extremely multifaceted and very respected body of work that comprises not only art objects, paintings, drawings, and texts but also actions, performances, and experimental films.

In 2014 the MAK was able to acquire almost the entire oeuvre of Missing Link together with comprehensive documentary material as a legacy. With the exhibition and accompanying publication, as well as the cataloging of the holdings in the museum’s online database, Missing Link’s complete works are now accessible in full for the first time: from the protagonists’ early works—mostly utopian projects associated with the so-called Austrian Phenomenon—via various artistic actions in the 1970s, media analyses, and research projects, to the so-called Wiener Studien [Viennese Studies] and their participation in the exhibition Austrian New Wave in New York. Embedded in the history of art and architecture, the form and content of Missing Link’s work is contextualized in the show: on display are works by the group’s contemporaries such as Walter Pichler, Hans Hollein, Birgit Jürgenssen, Ettore Sottsass, and Joseph Beuys, as well as historical approaches, such as those by Otto Wagner, Josef Frank, the architecture of Red Vienna, and Viennese coffeehouse culture.