New Exhibition Gives an Insight into the Collection Frieder Burda

BADEN-BADEN.- From March 25, 2010 to June 20, 2010, a selection of works from the Collection Frieder Burda will be on display at the Museum Frieder Burda, making for an inspiring encounter with important works from its inventory, as well as with recently acquired paintings. The exhibition, entitled “There is something about these pictures…”, will comprise more than 100 paintings, sculptures, drawings, photographs and art installations by Pablo Picasso, Mark Rothko, Gerhard Richter, Anselm Kiefer, Isa Genzken, Neo Rauch, Robert Rauschenberg, Sigmar Polke, Willem de Kooning, Gregory Crewdson, Anton Henning, Nedko Solakov, Axel Hütte, as well as by Johannes Hüppi, John Chamberlain and William N. Copley. The title “There is something about these pictures…” refers to a quotation by the collector Frieder Burda, while talking about his passion for art and the intuitive way in which he built his collection.

The Collection Frieder Burda numbers among Europe’s major private art collections. It is so multifaceted that every new encounter offers a wide range of new perceptions and perspectives. The exhibition will be co-curated by the young art historian Patricia Kamp and Jean-Christophe Ammann, the former director of the Museum for Modern Art (Museum für Moderne Kunst) in Frankfurt. The presentation takes risks by boldly relating works in such a way that emphasis is placed on both the qualitative potential of the collection as well as the willingness, so to speak, of the works to respond to one another. What the two curators have developed is a statement of faith in the ability of the pictures to enter into a direct dialogue. Yet they first and foremost take up the collector’s vision that the pictures not only do something to him, the collector, but that they also have something to do with each other.

Light and space installations
One of the highlights of the exhibition will be an installation by the painter Anton Henning, who will travel to Baden-Baden to personally create a spatial situation specifically for this exhibition. Another highlight will be a light installation by US artist James Turrell, one of the best-known contemporary light artists: a room flooded with a mysterious and sublime light that is embracing the visitor like a shell. Thus, Turrell provides an entirely new definition to the perception of surface and colour.

Bulgarian artist Nedko Solakov will treat the walls of the Museum Frieder Burda as a giant canvas, scrawling his doodle-like, narrative drawings along a sequence of rooms. Solakov studied mural painting at the Academy of Arts in Sophia. He has created an oeuvre of funny, sarcastic and sometimes melancholic drawings, texts or installations that invite not only to laughter but reflection as well.

Frieder Burda: “I am curious about how James Turell’s light installation will look and, of course, I long to see Anton Henning’s and Nedko Solakov’s art interventions in Richard Meier’s building.”

Multifaceted Collection
The Frieder Burda Collection has its roots in German expressionism, and currently comprises more than 850 paintings, sculptures and works on paper. The fascination of colour and the emotional expressive qualities of painting are at the centre of the collector’s interest in art. This perspective has given rise to a Collection with a personal style, bringing together pioneering positions of painting in the 20th and 21st century. In so doing, the Collection concentrates on a select number of artists whose works are acquired with determination, assembling a comprehensive range of the oeuvre of some artists.

Previous exhibitions have focused on Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke, Georg Baselitz, and American painting, among others. This time, however, owing to the emotional and expressionist qualities of the chosen works, the accent will be placed on new, surprising dialogue situations, thus providing a particularly individual insight into the collection’s development and its basic character.

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