Overview Collections

Collection Berlin

The focus of the Berlin Collection is on conceptual photography. While works on paper and lithographs by Antoni Tàpies, Eduardo Chillida and Walter Stöhrer initially formed the basis of the Berlin Collection from the mid-1980s, a special interest in photography soon emerged. Gradually, more and more photographic works were added to the collection, especially conceptual works with roots in experimental photography of the 1970s. Young and very young artists are gathered here. Many come from Berlin. The boundaries between photography and photo art and other artistic media are fluid: Works on paper also continue to be at the heart of the collection.

The work of Viktoria Binschtok, who deals with media, algorithms and visual culture in her photographic collages, is representative of the character of the collection. For Binschtok, a photograph is not a representation of reality, but a visual reference to an individually experienced present – and the starting point for new associations. With an exciting game of confusion between digital reality and analog virtuality, Binschtok questions our familiar visual behavior.

Other important bodies of work in the collection are those of Barbara Probst and the American photographer Jan Groover. There is also an interest in light art – this is what the neon works by Berlin artist Fiete Stolte stand for.

Collection Düsseldorf

The Düsseldorf Collection encompasses a variety of artistic positions that deal with our present in a wide variety of ways. In addition to painting, photography, drawing, collages, large-scale installations and video works are part of the collection. The focus is on conceptual art with political, sociological and psychological content.

Psychedelic-traumatic drawings, sculptures and paintings show the individual with his most intimate fantasies and fears. Examples include works by Pieter Hugo, Thomas Hirschhorn, Jon Bock, Manfred Pernice, Sophie Calle, Gregor Schneider, Kader Attia, Erik van Lieshout and Marge Monko. The collection remains in constant motion and is regularly expanded to include young positions such as Henrike Naumann, Julian Röder, Achim Riethmann and Kris Lemsalu.

The Düsseldorf collection does not see itself as static, is never closed and makes openness a principle. In this way, as the museum director and curator Peter Friese once put it, it does not generate a consensus, but rather deliberately a dissent: "They are works that do not provide answers, but rather invite the viewer to ask the right questions."

Collection Munich

The Munich Collection is not limited to a specific medium or genre. The focus of the collection is on painting and drawing, both representational and abstract, supplemented by sculpture. It focuses on works by contemporary artists that affect the collector emotionally.

Examples of this are the sounds of the (home) city in Yin Xiuzhen's "Frankfurt" suitcase, the mood of the photographs by Laurenz Bregenz, the relief-like structures and sharp lines in the drawings by Lucie Beppler and the drawings by Nicole Wendel, Sharka Hyland, Philip Lörsch and Michael Simpson.

Geographically, the main focus of the represented artists is in Europe and Asia, especially China and Japan. Examples are the objects by Yin Xiuzhen and Shiharu Shiota, who both work with textiles, which are characterized by their materiality, the paintings by Hans Schulte, who creates relief-like works on a painting surface he has developed himself, and the paintings and drawings by Leiko Ikemura, who creates strange and distant beings and landscapes in her works.

Collection Stuttgart

“Behind & Beyond” is the leitmotif for the programmatic focus of the Stuttgart Collection. The starting point and focus is on German and American photography, gradually expanded to include contemporary and very young positions in painting. The focus is on works with non-figurative subjects that move between abstraction and depiction and only reveal themselves to the viewer via hidden content or special digital techniques at second glance. The transition from photography to painting can often hardly be made out.

The emblematic guiding principle of “Behind” spans consistently across three axes: with photography on the border of painting by American classics, the Helsinki School and Becher students, through conceptual photography with a focus on the Leipzig School of Graphics & Book Art & Mixed Media Art, all the way to abstract painting.

These in-between worlds are inhabited by American painter Isca Greenfield-Sanders, who translates third-party visual material impressionistically, by Spanish painter Secundino Hernàndez with hidden, comic-like content and also by French painter Bernard Piffaretti, who, according to his strict constructivist set of rules, apparently creates double realities.

In photography, anchor points are, for example, Jörg Sasse, who uses foreign image material to build his own worlds on his computer, the painterly landscape portraits of the Finn Elina Brotherus with self-reflective and art-historical references – or the conceptual works of the Leipzig School around Timm Rautert, Sven Johne, Adrian Sauer and Viktoria Binschtok.

Regardless of whether works are created through the use of search algorithms or the use of external image materials: It is the question of artistic appropriation, authorship and their influence on our perception that moves and characterizes the collection.