Conceptual exercises is Ewa Partum's first comprehensive exhibition in Austria. Since the mid-1960s, the Polish artist has consciously combined feminist intentions with conceptual and aesthetic strategies. Alongside her works with letters, often staged in public spaces, and her mail art, she has used her own naked body as an artistic tool.

The touch of a woman

The exhibition presents key works by the artist. Outdoors, in front of the museum, is installed The legality of space. First shown in 1971 in Freedom Square in Łódź, the installation consists of traffic signs as well as self-designed mandatory and prohibitory signs, drawing attention to the state's control of public space. For Change, the artist had half of her face made up as an aging woman in 1974 and plastered around 600 posters of this transformation throughout the city in 1978. In Self-identification from 1980, she collaged her naked body into street scenes and, for the exhibition opening, stepped naked onto the sidewalk in front of the gallery at the moment a wedding party was gathered there in front of a registry office. "My touch is the touch of a woman"—this sentence appears beneath the lipstick-red lips on one of her mail art sheets from 1971, accompanied by the note "poem by Ewa."

Conceptual exercises presents an artistic position that is intellectually clear and precise, unleashes social explosiveness, and at the same time is borne of love and gentleness.