MUNICH.- The Lenbachhaus welcomes Melanie Vietmeier to the team as the new Curator Modern Art and Head of Collection Blauer Reiter / Kubin Archive.

Melanie Vietmeier's (born 1978) work focuses on modern and contemporary art and on art under conditions of globality. After more than six years in São Paulo (Brazil) and Nantes (France), during which she was able to gain international experience and build up a network with cultural institutions, she is now starting her work in Munich.

She studied art history, economics and English in Bochum and Reading (UK) and was awarded her doctorate at Leuphana University Lüneburg with the dissertation Wassily Kandinsky's Woodcuts. Materiality Medium Experiment. During her traineeship at the Lenbachhaus in the collection area of Der Blaue Reiter, she assisted with an extensive retrospective on Wassily Kandinsky (2008/09) and curated an exhibition on the artist's print oeuvre. She then co-curated an exhibition on Jean Dubuffet's artist's books for the Literaturhaus München and worked on various exhibition projects on 20th century art at the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf from 2009-2012.

A new look at current discussions on the transnational, decolonisation and emancipation processes characterises her more recent projects as a freelance curator and art historian. From 2015-2019, she was a collaborator on the exhibition and research project museum global. Microhistories of an Ex-centric Modernity at the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, for which she curated a microhistory on the modernist movement in Brazil.

In 2019, she was a fellow of the Transregional Academy Spaces of Art in Mexico City (Forum Transregionale Studien/Max Weber Stiftung). Most recently, she curated the exhibition RETOUR in Nantes (2021) on the topic of the restitution of cultural objects from colonial contexts from the perspective of contemporary artists such as Kendell Geers, Sinzo Aanza or Pélagie Gbaguidi and carried out the research project Biennials as Seismograph for the Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations (ifa).

Her first project at the Lenbachhaus is a comprehensive exhibition on the work of the Beirut-born artist and writer Etel Adnan (1925-2021). This first institutional exhibition in Germany, curated by Sébastien Delot, director of the LaM in Lille, and organised in cooperation with the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf, pays tribute to this important representative of modernism, whose work unites cultures and disciplines. Etel Adnan held artists such as Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky and Gabriele Münter in particular esteem, from whose works she drew essential inspiration.