25 – Jubilee Exhibition

MUCA founders Stephanie and Christian Utz can look back on 25 years of collecting:

The Museum of Urban and Contemporary Art (MUCA) has always aimed to be a preserver of artworks that come from the ephemeral, urban ecosystem. With over 1,200 exhibits, the MUCA collection is now one of the most important collections of urban art in Europe.

To mark its 25th anniversary, the MUCA presented selected works and objects from October 2022 to September 2023, which are representative of the collector couple's long-standing personal passion and thematise the epochal and social development of street and urban art.

The MUCA collection began in 1998 with the first works attributable to Pop Art culture. These served as the starting point for the museum visitors' journey through time in the anniversary exhibition. Visitors were given an insight into how the core collection has grown since the 2000s to include ever more outstanding works and how it has become linked to contemporary art in a broader sense.

Works were grouped together thematically in various exhibition areas, allowing the viewer to connect motifs from the collection with historical genres of contemporary art. For example, there are links between a JR and Christo, an Andy Warhol and Harland Miller, Frank Auerbach and Antony Micallef, or Banksy and Keith Haring. 

The exhibition highlighted themes and trends in Pop Art, art in public space, socio-political/propaganda art and contemporary figurative painting.

In addition, there were special highlights within the MUCA supporting programme over a period of 25 weeks as part of the anniversary.