MUNICH.- With her unmistakable signature style and her inexhaustible imagination, Beate Kuhn (1927-2015) is among the most important German ceramic artists working after 1945. Using genuine pottery materials and techniques, she created an oeuvre that far surpasses functional ceramics and ties in with post-war developments in fine art from Picasso to the seriality of Minimal Art.

While in the first years of her practice Beate Kuhn still worked mainly making painted vessels, artistic ceramic sculptures were later to become the focus of her output. She developed a completely independent formal idiom using basic elements such as cylinders, cones, spheres, cup shapes or discs in varying sequences.

Alongside art and music, it was nature that continually provided her with new impulses for her engagement with themes such as movement, rhythm and change. Even her less figurative works conjure up associations of the underwater world, of corals and marine plants, and the nature in our surroundings, the branches of shrubs, tree trunks, flowers or other plants. The additive groupings often reflect natural laws of the life process, of growth and rhythmic change.

It is thanks to the gift from Mannheim-based ceramics collector Klaus Freiberger that Die Neue Sammlung is able to present a comprehensive overview of all of Beate Kuhn’s work periods with around 190 works made between 1954 and 2013.

Klaus Freiberger worked as an architect and at the same time established a collection of over 2,000 objects over the course of nearly 60 years, which he has generously bequeathed to Die Neue Sammlung. The works of Beate Kuhn’s that he has acquired hold a special position in the collection. As the collector is only a few years younger than the artist herself, Freiberger was able to accompany the creative development of the ceramic artist and recipient of numerous awards with a passionate and at the same time expert gaze. His gift represents a fantastic addition to the museum’s own collection of ceramics.

Since its foundation in 1925, Die Neue Sammlung has been collecting ceramics, so far exhibiting these mostly at the International Ceramics Museum in Weiden. Die Neue Sammlung is delighted to provide a ceramic oeuvre with the prominent platform that is an exhibition at Pinakothek der Moderne for the first time.

A catalogue will be issued by arnoldsche Art Publishers to accompany the exhibition that will include a comprehensive inventory of all of Beate Kuhn’s works in the Freiberger collection.