DUSSELDORF.- New perspectives on art history: Under the title “Your Museum! Your Collection!” the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen is showing its collection at K20 with masterpieces from Etel Adnan to Andy Warhol in a comprehensive new presentation beginning on July 6, 2024. With the reopening, visitors to the museum can look forward to several new offerings. The new collection tour takes visitors through twenty rooms featuring more than 180 works of art created between 1904 and 2023. Highlights include the new acquisitions that have entered the museum since 2017, under the direction of Susanne Gaensheimer. Numerous juxtapositions of historical and contemporary works invite visitors to take a fresh look at history and the present. A comprehensive digital guide allows visitors to put together their own tour of the collection, learn more about internationally renowned artists through audio talks, or let DJ Wolfram (DFA Records Public Possession/Live from Earth) accompany them through the collection with his soundtrack “The Sound of the Collection,” produced especially for K20. The new “Collection Online” will also be available from July 6. Nearly 300 works can be rediscovered and explored through a digital gallery.

The Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen is one of the most important museums in Europe. Founded in 1961, it houses a unique collection of twentieth and twenty-first century art at its two locations, K20 and K21. For the first time in the museum’s history, the new presentation of the collection at K20 breaks down the boundaries of the Western canon and presents the history of modern art from a more global perspective. On view are more than 180 works of classical modern and postwar art, including seminal masterpieces by artists such as Paul Klee, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Jackson Pollock, and Andy Warhol, as well as new acquisitions by important women artists such as Etel Adnan, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Gabriele Münter, Alice Neel, and Lygia Pape, and works by non-European artists acquired in recent years. With works such as these, the collection now exemplifies the history of modern abstraction, making it one of the world’s most prominent and polyphonic collections of modern art and expanding the art historical canon to include positions by women and non-Western artists.

For the director of the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Prof. Dr. Susanne Gaensheimer, the new presentation of the collection is a milestone for the museum: “I am delighted that we are finally able to present our intensive work of recent years to visitors and send them on a journey through global art history. With this new presentation of the collection, we are illuminating a history in which important works by non-European artists will be shown alongside well-known icons of Western art. With this new collection presentation, the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen enables us all to find ourselves in the history of modernism from different perspectives of the present and to engage with it.”

The Museum in Transition

Since Susanne Gaensheimer took over as director in 2017, the Kunstsammlung has been engaged in a programmatic process of opening itself up under the motto “Rethinking the Collection.” One of its central tasks is to honor the legacy of this unique collection, while at the same time rethinking the museum against the backdrop of current challenges and continuously developing the collection in the context of polyphony, globality, and digitality. In this process of transition, the Kunstsammlung has significantly expanded its holdings over the past seven years through targeted new acquisitions of modern painters and non- Western artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

For many decades, the profile of the collection of the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein Westfalen was shaped by the Western canon and the idea of the male artistic genius. From 1962 to 1990, under the founding director Werner Schmalenbach, only three works by women artists entered the collection: two paintings by Maria Helena Vieira da Silva and a wall piece by Lee Bontecou as a donation. Between 2017 and 2024, Susanne Gaensheimer acquired more than 100 works and groups of works by women artists for the collection, including seminal art historical works by Etel Adnan, Sonia Delaunay, Noa Eshkol, Helen Frankenthaler, Simone Fattal, Isa Genzken, Carmen Herrera, Alice Neel, Henrike Naumann, Lygia Pape, Charlotte Posenenske, Anne Truitt, and Marianne Werefkin. During the same period, more than sixty-five works by non-Western artists were added to the public collection, including important works by Arpita Akhanda, Rasheed Araeen, Kader Attia, Anna Boghiguian, Martha Boto, Park Seo-Bo, Cao Fei, Isaac Julien, Fouad Kamel, Senzeni Marasela, Mayo, Zanele Muholi, the Raqs Media Collective, Dayanita Singh, Hassan El-Telmissani, Wang Tuo, Ai Weiwei, and Akram Zaatari.

Visions of Tomorrow. Reflections on Yesterday

Throughout the twentieth century, artists responded to the radical upheavals and crises of their time. Their ideas accompanied the dawn of a world dominated by technology.

Inventions such as the X-ray, radioactivity, space travel, television, computers, and the Internet and the changes they brought about provoked fears as well as visions of the future. But it was not only technological innovations that affected life: At the same time, wars were raging in different parts of the world. Many artists had to flee and find new homes in other places. In the face of the radical changes of the twentieth century, art was also challenged to constantly redefine its meaning and role. The seminal works in the collection reflect the visions and innovations, the crises and destruction, the liberation and pain, and thus the dawn of the modern world in the twentieth century.

The tour of the collection follows a loose chronological structure. It interweaves thematic rooms with intergenerational dialogues. Two of the rooms were designed by the artists Anys Reimann (b. 1965, lives in Düsseldorf) and Peter Uka (b. 1975, lives in Cologne). With its various focal points, the tour traces the history of the founding of the Kunstsammlung and its unique collection: What were the conditions that led to the emergence of modernism in Europe, Latin America, and North Africa? And what role did the cosmopolitan city of Paris play in the emergence of the avant-garde? The themes have been chosen to reveal influential connections between the past and the present. They shed light on a history of modern art that tells of a global transformation characterized by ruptures, repetitions, and continuities that occurred not in a straight line but in loops. On the one hand, the historical works are embedded in the context in which they were created and, on the other, they are presented in such a way that they can be seen anew from different contemporary perspectives.

Curators: Susanne Gaensheimer and Vivien Trommer