THE MQ LIBELLE IS MAKING WAVES: FROM THE LEOPOLD MUSEUM’S ROOF DOWN TO LEVEL -2
13.10.2025
Five Years After the Inauguration of the Urban Space on the Museum’s Rooftop, the Exhibition Showcases Works by Brigitte Kowanz, Eva Schlegel, as well as Laurids and Manfred Ortner.
The MQ Libelle on the roof of the Leopold Museum, which was inaugurated in the autumn of 2020, represented the first architectural addition to the MuseumsQuartier (MQ) in Vienna. 25 meters above street level, the viewing platform on the museum’s roof affords stunning views of Vienna’s inner city and the splendid buildings along the Ringstraße. The terrace landscape, which can be accessed for free, provides an event location, meeting place and widely visible landmark, for which the architects Laurids (*1941) and Manfred Ortner (*1943) cooperated with the internationally renowned artists Brigitte Kowanz (1957–2022) and Eva Schlegel (*1960).
“Celebrating the fifth anniversary of the MQ Libelle, the exhibition Kowanz. Ortner. Schlegel highlights the artistic intentions and congenial interaction of the installation’s four protagonists: Brigitte Kowanz, Eva Schlegel, as well as the architects Laurids and Manfred Ortner.”
Dominik Papst, curator of the exhibition
The architectural office of the Ortner brothers won the competition for the erection of the MQ in Vienna, the largest cultural construction of the Second Republic, built between 1986 and 2001. The MQ is frequented by more than five million visitors a year, and is among the biggest art and cultural areas in Europe. From the beginning, Ortner & Ortner (O & O), who planned the Leopold Museum, the Kunsthalle Wien and the mumok – Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, had a floating, futurist platform in mind for the extension. Their architectural work process was accompanied by impressive, large-format chalk drawings which are shown in Vienna for the first time to mark the MQ Libelle’s five-year anniversary. The drawings afford insights into the world of imagination of the two Linz-born State Prize winners. The jubilee further provides the opportunity for the first presentation in Austria of two temporary, extensive installations by Brigitte Kowanz (Expo Line, 2020) and Eva Schlegel (Welle der Libelle, 2025) in the Upper Atrium of the Leopold Museum. The works enter into a symbiotic interaction with the two interventions by the artists on the roof of the museum, as well as with O & O’s generous architecture. Through their works, Kowanz and Schlegel allow for the architects’ spatial and light structure to be perceived in a new way.
BRIGITTE KOWANZ, EXPO LINE, 2020
“The encounter between the ascending line of Expo Line and the Light Circles hovering above the building unfurls a poetical field of tension between the clear, rational architecture of the museum and its extension into the urban space – between interior and exterior, space and drawing, construction and gesture.”
Adrian Kowanz, director of the ESTATE BRIGITTE KOWANZ
The three monumental Light Circles by Brigitte Kowanz on the roof of the Leopold Museum mark a dynamic, widely visible symbol within the cityscape. Their appearance changes depending on whether it is day or night, conveying either a sense of materiality or immateriality. In the work Expo Line – which Kowanz, as one of most eminent exponents of conceptual and media art in the world, originally created for the Austrian pavilion at the Expo 2020 in Dubai – the “infinite form” inherent in the Light Circles dissolves into verticality and sculpturality. At the Leopold Museum, where this eight-meter-tall light installation is shown for the first time in Austria, the work appears in a new context. Entering into a dialogue with the atrium’s generous stone cubature, the trail of light can be experienced in a new way in its unencumbered gestural grace and multi-perspectivity. Thus, Expo Line opens up new perspectives of perception, also in terms of the surrounding architecture’s light and spatial structure.
EVA SCHLEGEL, WELLE DER LIBELLE , 2025
“Space and its manifold manifestations are the central theme of my work. Through various experiments, materials and concepts, I try to make my viewers aware of – and alter – their perception of space.”
Eva Schlegel, artist
The artist Eva Schlegel enveloped the 94-meter-long, glazed shell of the MQ Libelle in 2020 with a structure made up of 2.4 million individual white dots, which from a distance combine to create the impression of a veil with folds. With her temporary spatial installation, created especially for the Leopold Museum, titled Welle der Libelle, the media artist transferred the veil motif into the interior of the museum and into the three-dimensional sphere. Nearly 1,100 strings with a total of 3.5 million shimmering silvery aluminum spheres form a semi-transparent curtain, measuring 19 meters long and weighing in excess of 400 kilograms, which extends into the depth of the atrium in a wave-like manner. It conveys a sense of lightness which enters into a dialogue with the museum’s imposing stone cubature, opening up new perspectives of the building via a circular mirror on the floor.
LAURIDS AND MANFRED ORTNER, DRAWINGS, 1986–2025
“Our oeuvre is shaped by an increasing awareness of the urban space. Much in keeping with this, the MQ Libelle, too, appears like a space capsule, a model of consciousness-expanding architecture.”
Laurids Ortner
The futuristic-looking MQ Libelle [Libelle = German for dragonfly], measuring nearly 30 meters long and over four meters tall, landed in 2020 on the 900-square-meter roof garden of the Leopold Museum. According to Laurids Ortner, it is a “shimmering, glistening, airy and transparent” being which appears to hover weightlessly above the baroque roof landscape and the stone cubature of the museums in the main courtyard of the MuseumsQuartier. In their large-format chalk drawings, Laurids and Manfred Ortner developed this vision further, creating independent artworks which are now shown in Vienna for the first time. The series of drawings for Blue Disc – one of many, provisional architecture interventions by Haus-Rucker-Co from the 1980s – occupies an equally important role in the Ortner brothers’ graphic oeuvre. The drawings accompanying the projects Blue Disc (1986), MQ Libelle (2010, 2020) as well as the latest series, titled Dachstein View (2024/25), span a period of 40 years. What they have in common is the vision of an architecture that effects subtle shifts in the perception of its viewers, sensually condensing ostensibly familiar structures and landscapes to allow us to experience them in a new way.
The exhibition Kowanz. Ortner. Schlegel is shown at the Leopold Museum until 11th January 2026.
Opening Celebrations
The exhibition opening – hosted by the Leopold Museum’s Directors Hans-Peter Wipplinger and Moritz Stipsicz in the presence of the Leopold Museum board members Josef Ostermayer, Saskia Leopold and Danielle Spera – was attended by the architects and artists Eva Schlegel, Laurids and Manfred Ortner, Willi Fürst, Angela Hareiter, Peter Hauenschild, Anna Heindl, Matthias Köster, Kirsten Lampert, Hans Kupelwieser, Carl Pruscha, Philipp Schweiger, Markus Spiegelfeld, Walter Vopava and Manfred Wakolbinger, photographer Caroline Al Khafaji-Böhm, the MQ’s director Bettina Leidl, Stella Rollig (managing director, Belvedere), Lili Hollein (managing director, MAK – Museum of Applied Arts), Peter Weinhäupl (director, Klimt Foundation), Martin Böhm (CEO, Dorotheum), Georg Pölzl (head of the board of the Leopold Museum’s Circle of Patrons), gallery owners Alexander Giese, Ursula and Thomas Krinzinger, art dealer Amir Shariat, Isabella and Adrian Kowanz (director, ESTATE BRIGITTE KOWANZ), art manager Christoph Thun-Hohenstein, art consultant Bernhard A. Boehler, advertiser Mariusz Jan Demner, Leopold Birstinger, Jürgen Pölzl (Salon Leopold committee), curator Antonia Hoerschelmann, Ute Weber-Woisetschläger (Medical University of Vienna), actor Helmut Bohatsch, cultural manager Elisabeth Schweeger, curator Leonie Manhardt-Zech, Ingrid Ortner, Georg Rusalin (studio management, ESTATE BRIGITTE KOWANZ), Karlheinz Roschitz (Kronen Zeitung), art historians Daniela Gregori, Rainer Metzger, Patricia Spiegelfeld, Verena Traeger and Thomas Zaunschirm, as well as Nina Wöss (Fund F), journalist Eva Maria Klinger, art conservator Manfred Siems, Christoph Schulenburg (Dorotheum), and many others.
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