Karl-Heinrich Müller

Karl-Heinrich Müller (born June 8, 1936 in Düsseldorf ; † November 5, 2007 there ) was a German broker , art collector and art patron .

Heerich Tower, Museum Insel Hombroich

Khmer sculpture, Museum Insel Hombroich

Life

Karl-Heinrich Müller was born the son of a factory worker. He was already collecting ektachromes from works of art during his school days. With an innovative concept as a broker for industrial real estate, he became financially successful. His company INIMA-Industrie-Immobilien GmbH. + Co KG had branches in Vienna and London .

K.-H. used his fortune. Müller to acquire art for his own collection and to support artist friends.

On September 6, 1982, Müller acquired a villa from the early 19th century (today known as the Rosa Haus) including a park on the banks of the Erft between Neuss-Holzheim and chapels . By buying adjacent properties, he expanded the area to 25 hectares by the 1990s. Müller had exhibition pavilions and artist studios built based on designs by the artist Erwin Heerich and founded the Museum Insel Hombroich . In 1994 he acquired the former Hombroich missile station ; the designs for the redesign were presented at the 6th Architecture Biennale in Venice in 1996 .

Its collection mainly includes modern and contemporary works as well as artifacts from Asia and Africa. In 1986 he bought Khmer sculptures .

In 1996, Müller brought the site, buildings and art collection to the Insel Hombroich Foundation , in which the city of Neuss, the district and the state of North Rhine-Westphalia are involved.

He died of a heart attack at the age of 71 .

literature

• Peter Sager: The possessed. Encounters with art collectors between Aachen and Tokyo . Cologne 1992; ISBN 3-7701-2741-2 .
• Thomas Kling: Karl-Heinrich Müller (series of publications: Energies - Synergies . Vol. 3, published by the Kunststiftung NRW). DuMont, Cologne 2004, ISBN 3-8321-7314-5 .
• Tijs Goldschmidt: De Eilandbaron . In: Tijs Goldschmidt (ed.): De Eilandbaron . Athenaeum-Polak & Van Gennep, Amsterdam 2006, ISBN 978-9-02531-761-4 , pp. 13-32. ( Online ).
• Andreas Rossmann : parallel nature. On the death of the patron Karl-Heinrich Müller. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , Sunday newspaper of November 7, 2007, p. 44.