Klaus-Jürgen Sembach

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Klaus-Jürgen Sembach (born April 15, 1933 in Magdeburg ; † March 29, 2020 in Berlin ) was a German exhibition architect . From 1980 to 1994 he was head of the Industrial Culture Center in Nuremberg.

Live and act

Klaus-Jürgen Sembach was born in Magdeburg in 1933 as the son of an insurance employee and a housewife. As the father, as a former NSDAP member, saw no chance of being taken over by the state insurance companies in the Soviet occupation zone after the war , the family fled to Stuttgart via the still unpaved inner-German border .

While studying architecture at the Technical University of Stuttgart , Sembach dealt with the work of the architect Henry van de Velde , whom he was able to get to know personally. This led to the fact that after the death of Van de Velde, Sembach was called to record his drawings in Brussels . As part of an event organized by the Henry van de Velde Society , which was newly founded in Hagen , Sembach was offered the position of museum curator for the Munich New Collection in 1959 , which he took on after graduating in 1960. The New Collection showed changing exhibitions, the presentation of which the then director Wend Fischer and Klaus-Jürgen Sembach - because it was all about good form - made the highest demands. For this purpose, Sembach carried out a fundamental redesign of the six exhibition rooms on Prinzregentenstrasse in 1966/1967 . It was based on a grid system into which showcases, platforms and hanging, as it were floating, walls could be fitted. Even later, a large number of different elements were characteristic of Sembach's architectural conception in relation to historical themes.

Sembach discovered photography as a focus of his collection earlier than others, which led to the far-sighted purchase of works by William Eggleston , Stephen Shore and others as early as the 1970s .

In 1980 there was a public debate in the press and on television about the successor to the management of the Neue Sammlung. Although the directors' conference of the Bavarian State Museums and the Board of Trustees of the Neue Sammlung unanimously voted for Sembach as the new director, Minister of Education Hans Maier and Ministerialrat Wolfgang Eberl appointed the art historian Hans Wichmann . The Nuremberg cultural advisor Hermann Glaser seized the opportunity . He entrusted Sembach with the development of the Museum of Industrial Culture he initiated. Until the Centrum Industriekultur finally had its own premises in 1990, exhibitions were set up in various locations in Nuremberg, such as 1982 industrial culture, expeditions into everyday life in an old tram depot, or Train of Time - the time of trains for the 150th anniversary of the first railway line between Nuremberg and Fürth 1985 in a disused ironworks.

For Sembach, the transition to retirement planned in 1993 became a freelance self-employment for museums throughout Germany that continued to last. The very first order from the Klassik Stiftung Weimar was to have far-reaching consequences. Sembach's “House in a House”, a two-story installation in the Kunsthalle on Weimar Theaterplatz for the exhibition The early Bauhaus and Johannes Itten , was so popular that it lasted for over 14 years. Sembach had created facts. One spoke quite naturally of the Weimar Bauhaus Museum , years before it was consequently officially founded.

In terms of content, Sembach's exhibitions were no longer about the recent past, but mostly about historical topics. Each of Sembach's concepts can be summarized on a basic idea that is characteristic of the topic or the time covered. With a baroque semicircular gesture to open the exhibition Johann Conrad Schlaun 1695–1773, Late Baroque Architecture , Sembach showed the architect his appreciation in 1995 in the Westphalian State Museum . “But the stylistic approach to an era can only be approximate. Your own modern feeling prevents you from being completely absorbed in it. ”In Broken Are the Fetters of the Schlendrians 2002, the book is a leitmotif as a sign of the importance of a new reading culture which, during the Enlightenment, brought about a fundamental change in Westphalia from argrarland to an industrial state.

The cultural foundation of the federal states took advantage of the meanwhile very good reputation of the “old master of design” to get larger processes rolling with his help. He was commissioned to redesign the dome hall of the run-down Moritzburg for the purpose of reopening the collection of the Stiftung Staatliche Galerie Moritzburg in Halle in 2003 . The hopes associated with this were aimed at making every visitor and politician aware of the Moritzburg's potential as a museum. With the subsequent happy funding, it was able to reopen in 2008 as the largest art museum in Saxony-Anhalt .

When it came to making Hitler and the Germans the subject of an exhibition in Germany for the first time in 2010 , the curators around Hans-Ulrich Thamer and the German Historical Museum chose Klaus-Jürgen Sembach, who is now 77 years old. The aim was "to relativize or break the power of the images that the Nazi directors left us and that continue to have an effect everywhere today with counter-images." Using cleverly constructed perspectives and visual axes, Sembach managed to always relate the exhibited objects to the context to put behind the staging of power and national community. In addition to the depiction of a massive parade of uniforms in a large showcase, recessed viewing slits into a dark camp world meant that the existence of concentration camps could be perceived at the time.

Klaus-Jürgen Sembach lived and worked in Berlin and Munich .

Exhibition designs (selection)

  • 1965 film posters , Die Neue Sammlung , Munich
  • 1969: Around 1930. Buildings, furniture, equipment, posters, photos , Die Neue Sammlung, Munich
  • 1971: The hidden reason. Functional design in the 19th century , Die Neue Sammlung, Munich
  • 1976: Calendar construction. Early large astronomical devices from India, Mexico and Peru , Die Neue Sammlung, Munich
  • 1978: American Landscape Photography 1860–1978 , Die Neue Sammlung, Munich
  • 1980: 1950 - Orientation after the war , Die Neue Sammlung, Munich
  • 1981: The Useful Arts. Design technology and fine arts since the industrial revolution , exhibition grounds , Berlin
  • 1985: Train of Time - Time of Trains. Deutsche Eisenbahn 1835–1985 , former Tafelwerk , Nuremberg
  • 1986: Images of a German City. Nuremberg 1835–1985 , Goethe House , New York (traveling exhibition)
  • 1989: never was that much beginning. German Cities 1945–1949 , Museum of Industrial Culture , Nuremberg and Hamburger Bahnhof , Berlin
  • 1992: iron clothes. Armorer work from three centuries from the collection of the DHM , German Historical Museum , Berlin
  • 1992: Henry van de Velde. A European artist in his time , traveling exhibition: Karl Ernst Osthaus Museum (Hagen), Kunsthalle am Theaterplatz (Weimar), Bauhaus Archive (Berlin), Museum voor Sierkunst (Gent), Zurich, Germanisches Nationalmuseum (Nuremberg)
  • 1992: 1910 - half time of modernity. Van de Velde, Hoffmann, Behrens and the others , Westphalian State Museum for Art and Cultural History , Münster
  • 1995: twen. Revision of a legend , Münchner Stadtmuseum , Munich
  • 1996: Finally vacation. The Germans Travel , House of the History of the Federal Republic of Germany , Bonn
  • 1997: Development West - Development East. The planned cities of Wolfsburg and Eisenhüttenstadt in the post-war period , German Historical Museum, Berlin
  • 1998: great moments. Works of art from two millennia (objects, the purchase of which was funded by the Kulturstiftung der Länder ), Staatsgalerie Stuttgart , Stuttgart
  • 1999: Ways to Weimar. In search of the unity of art and politics , exhibition hall in the Thuringian State Administration Office, Weimar
  • 1999: Unity and Law and Freedom. Ways of the Germans 1949–1999 , Martin-Gropius-Bau , Berlin (7 designers were hired for 40 rooms, Sembach designed 12 of them)
  • 2002: bridging the gap. Polish history in maps and documents (Tomasz Niewodniczański collection), Berlin State Library , Berlin
  • 2002: The Sacharoffs. Two dancers from the Blue Rider's circle , German Dance Archive Cologne and Museum Villa Stuck , Munich; Design in Cologne , photographed by Cordia Schlegelmilch
  • 2003: Gottfried Semper 1803–1879. Architecture and Science , Architecture Museum TUM in the Pinakothek der Moderne in cooperation with ETH Zurich and the Museum für Gestaltung Zürich
  • 2005: Architecture of the child prodigies. Awakening and displacement in Bavaria 1945–1960 , TUM Architecture Museum in the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich
  • 2008: Typically Munich , the redesign of the Munich City Museum (permanent exhibition), Munich
  • 2008: Places of Longing . Traveling with artists , Westphalian State Museum for Art and Cultural History, Münster
  • 2010: Hitler and the Germans. Volksgemeinschaft and Crime , German Historical Museum, Berlin
  • 2015: Karl Blossfeldt. From the workshop of nature , Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich
  • 2016: Albert Renger-Patzsch. Ruhr area landscapes , Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich
  • 2017: Berlin Secession and Russian Ballet - Ernst Oppler , Dance Museum of the German Dance Archive Cologne
  • 2019: Aenne Biermann. Familiarity with things , Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich

Fonts (selection)

As an author

As editor

  • Munich. Photographic views 1885–1915. Schirmer / Mosel Verlag, Munich 1977. (in collaboration with Wilfried Ranke and Gabriele Fahr-Becker)
  • New furniture. An international cross-section from 1950 to today. Gerd Hatje publishing house, Stuttgart 1982.
  • Sciences in Berlin. (three volumes accompanying the exhibition The Congress Thinks ) Gebrüder Mann Verlag , Berlin 1987. (in collaboration with Tilmann Buddensieg and Kurt Düwell )
  • Industrial monuments of the 19th century in Royal Bavaria. Schirmer / Mosel Verlag, Munich 1990. (in collaboration with Volker Hütsch)
  • 1910, half time of modernity. Van de Velde, Behrens, Hoffmann and the others. Verlag Gerd Hatje, Stuttgart 1992. (in collaboration with Ulrich Schulze, Hans-Ulrich Thamer, Klaus Schölzel)
  • 20th century furniture design. Benedikt Taschen Verlag, Cologne 1993. (in collaboration with Gabriele Leuthäuser and Peter Gössel)
  • The fifties. Home belief shine. The style of a decade. DW Callwey publishing house, Munich 1998. (in collaboration with Michael Koetzle and Klaus Schölzel)

literature

  • Christoph Hölz ​​(Hrsg.): Forms of showing - the exhibition designer Klaus-Jürgen Sembach. Deutscher Kunstverlag, Berlin and Munich 2013. ISBN 978-3-422-07168-1 .

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Gottfried Knapp: Obituary Klaus-Jürgen Sembach - Museum founder died. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung. March 30, 2020, accessed March 30, 2020 .
  2. ↑ Approaching America . In: Die Neue Sammlung (Ed.): American Landscape Photography 1860–1978 . Munich 1978, p. 3-10 .
  3. ↑ Peter M. Bode: Lech (me) am Arlberg. On the controversial appointment of the director of the Neue Sammlung . In: Münchner Abendzeitung . February 29, 1980, p. 18 .
  4. ^ Klaus-Jürgen Sembach: Industrial culture in Nuremberg. Experience in the run-up to a museum planning . In: Museum Education. World of work in the museum . Jonas Verlag, Marburg an der Lahn 1983, ISBN 3-922561-24-1 , p. 24-33 .
  5. ↑ a b c Christoph Hölz ​​(Hrsg.): Formen des Zeigens . Deutscher Kunstverlag, Berlin 2013, ISBN 978-3-422-07168-1 .
  6. ↑ Klaus Bußmann, Florian Matzner, Ulrich Schulze: Johann Conrad Schlaun. Late Baroque architecture in Europe . Oktagon, Stuttgart 1995, ISBN 3-927789-78-X .
  7. ↑ Gisela Weiß, Gerd Dethlefs (ed.): The shackles of the Schlendrians are broken. Westphalia's departure into the modern age . Kettler GmbH, Bönen 2002, ISBN 3-935019-45-9 .
personal data
SURNAME Sembach, Klaus-Jürgen
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German exhibition architect
DATE OF BIRTH April 15, 1933
PLACE OF BIRTH Magdeburg
DATE OF DEATH March 29, 2020
Place of death Berlin