HERFORD.- With Other People Think – A Selection from the Wemhöner Collection, the Museum Marta Herford is presenting the first exhibition of a selection from the art collection of the family entrepreneur Heiner Wemhöner, which in the meantime comprises around 1,800 works, in his hometown of Herford. Heiner Wemhöner’s collecting activity began in the late 1990s and over the years has evolved into an intense and ongoing commitment to contemporary art. The curator’s selection for the show in the Gehry Galleries includes sculptures, paintings, photographs, and expansive video installations. Their selection was based on a conceptual position that focuses on such themes as the corporeality of identity, political approaches and the sensory experience of the works in the architecture of the Marta. Almost all of the artists selected for the exhibition have already shaped the institutional canon of contemporary art. The exhibition does not simply reflect a Eurocentric perspective but also integrates artists from Asia, where the entrepreneur has been active for decades.
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With Other People Think – A Selection from the Wemhöner Collection, the Marta Herford is opening this year’s exhibition programme, which is dedicated to collecting art and the associated strategies and challenges. It will focus not only on the Marta Collection as the heart of the museum in two consecutive exhibitions but also on the practice of collecting in different contexts and forms.
The exhibition Other People Think – A Selection from the Wemhöner Collection looks at private art collecting and shows an exclusive section from the collection of Heiner Wemhöner. The head of a family company in Herford has been closely connected to the Marta ever since its founding: as a partner, sponsor and chairman of the board of Marta Freunde & Förderer e.V.
Heiner Wemhöner’s collecting activity began in the late 1990s and over the years has evolved into an intense and ongoing commitment to contemporary art. His collection includes all media from painting and sculpture by way of photography to film and video. Although the collection is wide-ranging thematically as well, it testifies first and foremost to Heiner Wemhöner’s very personal and intuitive approach to contemporary art that foregrounds the immediate encounter with art in sensory experience.
Selected works from the collection have already been shown in various exhibitions such as at the Mönchehaus Museum in Goslar and the PalaisPopulaire in Berlin, among others, but Other People Think – A Selection from the Wemhöner Collection is the first comprehensive presentation in the collector’s hometown. That the collection is being shown at the Museum Marta shortly before it is seen in spaces in Berlin and Herford built especially for it is thanks to an invitation from Marta director Kathleen Rahn. The exhibition’s title, Other People Think, refers to a work by the conceptual artist Alfredo Jaar, who was in turn alluding with this quotation from John Cage to other perspectives – and it can be applied as well to the collector, who purchases precisely whatever pleases him, regardless of what other people think about it.
The curator’s selection at the Marta Herford takes up the diversity of media in the collection and brings together twenty-five exemplary positions by artists who explore thematic areas that are as multifaceted as they are sublimely related. It focuses on the personal encounter with the work as a poetic, sensory experience. Around seventy works reflect on social, cultural and historical discourses and illustrate the potential of contemporary art to raise socially relevant questions. On 1,200 square metres in the galleries designed by Frank Gehry and extending beyond into the museum’s exterior and into urban space, they mirror the diversity of forms of expression in contemporary art and invite you to adopt different perspectives.
One emphasis of the show is on artistic engagement with the body, especially its fragility and vulnerability. Artists such as Marina Abramović & Ulay, Nevin Aladağ, Elmgreen & Dragset, Nan Goldin, Asta Gröting, and Ming Wong address in their works the subject of corporeal expression and its symbolic and physical dimensions. They thematise not only the physical existence of the body but also the social and cultural implications associated with its depiction. Architectural and public structures as well as role models and gender issues also play a decisive role in this context.
The latest five-channel installation Once Again … (Statues Never Die) (2022) by the African-British artist Isaac Julien is prominently presented in the long gallery as a central work in the exhibition. Its themes are the contexts of collecting and the issues of visibility and exclusion that are inherent to them. The large-format film installation, which is extended into the room by real sculptures, focuses on the work of Black artists. It calls historical narratives into question to address themes such as representation, memory and restitution and draws an arc to contemporary discourses on collecting policy and post-colonialism. Isaac Julien is one of the artists whose works the Wemhöner Collection has been following and acquiring over the years. This is also true of Monica Bonvicini, whose numerous works with text run like a thread through the exhibition Other People Think.
Additional thematic areas are dedicated to the critique of capitalism as well as to the debate over concepts such as society, togetherness, time, space and movement in works by artists such as Roberto Barni, Kexin Zang, Alicja Kwade, Bettina Pousstchi and Ugo Rondinone. Power structures are also a theme addressed by Monica Bonvicini, Alfredo Jaar and Yue Minjun, among others.
The show is being complemented by sculptural and abstract, gestural and narrative paintings by artists such as Georg Baselitz, Martha Jungwirth, Valérie Favre und Yan Shanchun. Their works join a fascinating dialogue that emphasises distinct conceptions of form, space and aesthetics in contemporary art and invites views to engage critically with the material and immaterial dimensions of art.
The exhibition is being accompanied by a varied programme with curators’ tours, workshops and conversations with the artists, including Alfredo Jaar, Michael Sailstorfer and Isaac Julien. The exhibition app provides further information on the artists and works. This is available in both text (DE/EN) and audio (EN) versions. The audio version was recorded by Marta director Kathleen Rahn.
On 7 May, the twentieth anniversary of the Museum Marta, the exhibition Interior as Idea – Works from the Marta Collection (8 May–29 Jun 2025), followed by another exhibition of the Marta collection. In this way, private collecting (Wemhöner Collection) and institutional collection (Marta Collection) will be related to each other. During the exhibition, the Wemhöner Collection will open its display storage on the company’s grounds in Herford and then in the autumn a house of art and culture in a historic banquet hall in Berlin Kreuzberg (Hasenheide 13), which was restored and redesigned over a period of years by the star architect David Chipperfield.
The exhibition Other People Think will be accompanied by a catalogue being published at the end of June 2025 with texts (Ger./Eng.) by Dr. Doris Krystof (Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen) and Kathleen Rahn, designed by Adeline Morlon.
Artists: Marina Abramović & Ulay, Nevin Aladağ, Roberto Barni, Georg Baselitz, Monica Bonvicini, Elmgreen & Dragset, Valérie Favre, Nan Goldin, Asta Gröting, Alfredo Jaar, Martha Jungwirth, Isaac Julien, Annette Kelm, Kexin Zang, Alicja Kwade, Bettina Pousttchi, Ugo Rondinone, Michael Sailstorfer, Tang Maohong, Erik van Lieshout, Erwin Wurm, Ming Wong, Yan Shanchun, Yue Minjun, Zuoxiao Zuzhou
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