Each year, the Heidi Horten Collection invites contemporary artists to create a seasonal Christmas-themed work. Following contributions by Manfred Erjautz (2022), Tillman Kaiser (2023), Maruša Sagadin (2024), and Gelatin (2025), the museum is this time presenting a sculpture by Eva Schlegel, created specifically for the museum, which enters into a direct dialogue with its architecture.

Eva Schlegel, born in 1960 in Hall in Tirol, lives and works in Vienna. She studied at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. From 1997 to 2006, she served as a professor of art and photography at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. 
Schlegel is one of the most important voices in Austrian contemporary art. Her artistic practice encompasses a wide range of forms of expression, including sculptures, photographs, pictorial objects, videos, and augmented reality projects. In her work, she consistently explores the question of how we can perceive and experience space in a wide variety of ways.

Eva Schlegel has participated in numerous international exhibitions and biennials, including the Sydney Biennale (1988, 1992), the Kochi Biennale in India (2017), and the Venice Biennale (1990). In 1995, she designed the Austrian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in collaboration with Coop Himmelb(l)au. In 2011, she served as curator of the Austrian Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale. 

Exhibitions (selection):

2026 Galleri Bo Bjerggaard, Copenhagen / 2026 Kunsthaus Graz; Belvedere21, Vienna / 2025 Leopold Museum, Vienna; Albertina, Vienna; Hai Museum of Art, Shanghai / 2024 Gallery Wendi Norris, San Francisco; Brooklyn Museum, New York

Playing—that's one of the best things there is.

Marcel Duchamp¹

The exhibition Play Date explores the connections between art and play and examines the various forms that playfulness can take in artistic works. Playful strategies—such as working with rules and experimental setups, as well as experimentation, rule-breaking, and chance—emerge as essential aspects of 20th- and 21st-century art.

Play Date allows visitors to experience play within the interplay of idea and variation, action and interaction, as well as free and competitive play. While artistic explorations of chess, ball games, card games, and dice games engage with and subvert the mechanics and logic of these classic game forms, instructions for action and participatory installations invite visitors to become part of the art themselves. Another focal point of the exhibition is performative role-playing, in which artists explore alternative forms of the self.

_{¹Alfred Kreymborg: „Why Marcel Duchamp Calls Hash a Picture“, in: Boston Evening Transcript, 19.9.1915, zit. n. Serge Stauffer: Marcel Duchamp. Interviews und Statements, Ostfildern-Ruit, 1992, S. 13.}

As a shared activity and experience, play—far beyond childhood—is a central social practice. In addition to its potential for shared enjoyment, the exhibition also highlights the conditions of participation and exclusion. It does not ask about winners and losers, but rather about the prerequisites of play: Who is allowed to play, and by whose rules is the game played? The exhibition views play as a communal process in which new forms of interaction and participation can be explored. Play Date opens up spaces for play in two senses—as an artistic practice as well as a field of social possibilities.

Featuring works from the Heidi Horten Collection as well as international loans by Eleanor Antin, Rasheed Araeen, John M. Armleder, John Baldessari, André Breton, Alexander Calder, Lygia Clark, Céline Condorelli, Marcel Duchamp, Fischli/Weiss, Eva Grubinger, Keith Haring, Benjamin Hirte, Carsten Höller, Anna Jermolaewa, Matthias Krinzinger, Palle Nielsen, Yoko Ono, Maruša Sagadin, Takako Saito, Cindy Sherman, Philipp Timischl, Sofie Thorsen, Kay Walkowiak, Andy Warhol, Erwin Wurm, and others.

A catalog will be published to accompany the exhibition.

Curated by Véronique Abpurg.