Wolfsburg Art Museum

The art museum on Hollerplatz, in August 2008

The Wolfsburg Art Museum is located in downtown Wolfsburg and was opened in 1994. It shows modern and contemporary art and is supported by the Volkswagen Art Foundation .

Four aspects of the industrial city of Wolfsburg, which was only founded in 1938, are taken up: modernity , urbanity , internationality and quality. The art museum is located at the "southern head" of the pedestrian zone, in the vicinity of the Alvar Aalto cultural center , Scharoun theater , planetarium and CongressPark .

The museum

In 1994 the Wolfsburg Art Museum opened with a retrospective by the French artist Fernand Léger . Gijs van Tuyl from the Netherlands was the founding director of the museum until 2004. From January 2006 until his death in March 2014, the Swiss art scholar Markus Brüderlin was director. Ralf Beil headed the museum from February 1, 2015 , previously director of the Mathildenhöhe Institute in Darmstadt from 2006 . On December 14, 2018, Beil was released with immediate effect; his contract runs until June 2019. His successor on April 1, 2019 was Andreas Beitin , previously director of the Aachen Ludwig Forum for International Art .

architecture

Art museum by night in summer 2004

The Hamburg architects Schweger & Partner planned the building of the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg as a transparent city loggia with a wide-spanning glass roof on the open Hollerplatz. The central hall has a square floor plan with sides 40 meters long and 16 meters high. This achieves a level of flexibility that allows the development of an architecture that is individually tailored to the respective exhibition. The hall is surrounded by two-storey exhibition rooms on three sides. The exhibition area is 3500 square meters. In connection with the exhibition Japan and the West , a Japanese garden was created in the courtyard of the building in 2007. The architect Kazuhisa Kawamura laid it on the model of the Zen garden Ryōan-ji in Kyoto and also incorporated elements of the architecture of Mies van der Rohe as a symbol of the dialogue between East and West.

Exhibitions

Since its opening, over 130 exhibitions of modern and contemporary art have been realized at the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg. Large shows from the area of ​​classical modernism, such as Fernand Léger and Bart van der Leck , alternate with overview shows such as Full House, German Open, Italian Metamorphosis and Blast to Freeze . Monographic exhibitions by contemporary artists, including those of Carl Andre , Andy Warhol , Luc Tuymans , Olafur Eliasson , Frank Stella , James Turrell and Imi Knoebel, complete the picture. Since the change of director in 2006, the program has focused on the content of large-scale historical and thematic exhibitions ( ArchiSkulptur, Japan and the West, Interior / Exterior, The Art of Deceleration ), solo exhibitions ( James Turrell and Alberto Giacometti ) and mid-care Retrospectives (including Douglas Gordon , Neo Rauch and Philip Taaffe ) take up the theme of modernity in the 21st century and illuminate them from different points of view. Various exhibitions are shown in the hall and gallery. With “Wolfsburg Unlimited. A city as a world laboratory ”, Ralf Beil showed his first major exhibition, in which he reflected the city in the museum - and the museum in the city. The exhibition Oil - the beauty and horror of the petroleum age , planned by Beil for 2019/2020 , presumably led to the dismissal of Beil, along with other exhibits critical of the automotive industry.

collection

The Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg has been collecting international contemporary art since 1994. This includes works of late modernism around Minimal Art , Conceptual Art and Arte Povera . Younger positions follow. The focus is on key works, work groups, work phases and the exemplary presentation of artistic developments. There is no documentation of so-called "currents", but a focus on positions and works that represent important aspects of contemporary art. Artists like Carl Andre, Christian Boltanski , Douglas Gordon, Andreas Gursky , Georg Herold , Anselm Kiefer , Mario Merz , Gerhard Merz , Bruce Nauman , Neo Rauch, Burhan Dogancay , Cindy Sherman , Philip Taaffe, Jeff Wall , Olafur Eliasson, Douglas Gordon, Thomas Schütte and Jeppe Hein stand for the selection from the broad field of contemporary art. Works from the collection are integrated into the temporary exhibitions or shown in temporary collections.

Other facilities

The art museum is funded and supported by the Freundeskreis Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg e. V., in which the “Young Friends” are integrated as promoters of young talent. With the studio, the museum has a generous area that is used for student projects, workshops and creative programs. There is also the Awilon museum restaurant and a museum shop operated by the hotel.

Foundation, endowment

The Wolfsburg Art Museum is supported by the non-profit art foundation Volkswagen . It receives a large part of its funds from the foundation of Asta and Christian Holler, the former owners of Volkswagen Versicherungsdienst GmbH (VVD). Christian Holler (1900–1969) and his wife Asta (1904–1989) decided early on to leave their entire fortune to the common good. After Asta Holler's death in 1990, the Holler Foundation was set up in Munich for this purpose, whose funds go to child welfare, the care of the seriously ill and the promotion of science and art. Since 1991, the Wolfsburg Art Museum has received a high proportion of the dividends annually from the Holler Foundation, which has already made the largest contribution to the museum's construction costs.

Exhibitions (selection)

Exhibition catalogs (selection)

• Man Ray. 'New as well as familiar': Photographs 1919–1942. Wolfsburg 1994, ISBN 3-89322-690-7 .
• Pietro Donzelli. The Light of Solitude - The Light of Solitude. Cantz, Ostfildern 1997, ISBN 3-89322-906-X .
• Andreas Gursky - Photographs 1994–1998. Cantz, Ostfildern 1998, ISBN 3-89322-425-4 .
• Ed van der Elsken. Photography and film 1949–2000. Wolfsburg 2000, ISBN 3-7757-0919-3 .
• Neo Rauch - New roles. DuMont, Cologne 2006, ISBN 3-8321-7732-9 .
• James Turrell. The Wolfsburg Project.
• Alberto Giacometti - The Origin of Space. Hatje Cantz, 2010, ISBN 978-3-7757-2714-3 .
• Gerwald Rockenschaub. multidial. Kerber, Bielefeld 2011, ISBN 978-3-86678-536-6 . (German English)
• Art & Fashion. Between Skin and Clothing. Kerber, Bielefeld / Leipzig / Berlin, ISBN 978-3-86678-538-0 .
• The art of slowing down. Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern 2011, ISBN 978-3-7757-3242-0 .
• Frank Stella - The Retrospective. Works 1958–2012. Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern 2012, ISBN 978-3-7757-3406-6 .
• Art & Textile - Fabric as a Material and Idea in Modernism from Klimt to Today Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern 2013, ISBN 978-3-7757-3626-8 .
• Oskar Kokoschka. Humanist and rebel. Hirmer Verlag Munich 2014, ISBN 978-3-7774-2250-3 .
• RealSurReal. Masterpieces of avant-garde photography. The New Seeing 1920. Siegert Collection. Wienand Verlag Cologne 2014, ISBN 978-3-86832-233-0 .
• Dark Mirror. Latin American art since 1968. 2015, ISBN 978-3-9817575-0-7 .
• Wolfsburg Unlimited. A city as a world laboratory. Hatje Cantz Verlag, Berlin 2016, ISBN 978-3-7757-4129-3 .
• Julian Rosefeldt. Midwest. 2016, ISBN 978-3-86832-345-0 .
• In the cage of freedom. 2016, ISBN 978-3-9817575-2-1 .
• This Was Tomorrow. Wienand Verlag, Cologne 2016, ISBN 978-3-86832-344-3 .
• Hans Op de Beeck. Works. Lannoo, Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, 2017, ISBN 978-94-014-3714-1 .
• Never Ending Stories . Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern 2017, ISBN 978-3-7757-4364-8 .
• Robert Lebeck 1968 . Steidl, Göttingen 2018.

literature

• Nicole Froberg, Ulrich Knufinke, Susanne Kreykenboom: Wolfsburg. The architecture guide. Braun Publishing, Berlin 2011, ISBN 978-3-03768-055-1 , p. 131.
• Markus Brüderlin. Selected texts. In search of the modern in the 21st century. Wienand Verlag Cologne 2014, ISBN 978-3-86832-242-2 .

Web links

Commons : Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• Literature from and about the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg in the catalog of the German National Library
• Homepage of the art museum

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Kunsthalle Wolfsburg: Farewell to the director . In: the daily newspaper . ( taz.de [accessed on July 6, 2017]).
2. ↑ Wolfsburg museum director has to go. deutschlandfunk.de from December 14, 2018, accessed on December 14, 2018
3. ^ Exhibition “Wolfsburg unlimited. A city as a world laboratory ”- the art museum bravely interferes . In: Deutschlandfunk Kultur . ( deutschlandfunkkultur.de [accessed on July 6, 2017]).
4. ^ Wolfsburg Unlimited - A City as a World Laboratory - Wolfsburg Art Museum. Retrieved July 6, 2017 . 
5. ^ Criticism of the car - Wolfsburg museum director fired. ndr.de from December 14, 2018, accessed on January 12, 2019

Coordinates: 52 ° 25 ′ 7.2 ″  N , 10 ° 47 ′ 7 ″  E