Kunstmuseen Krefeld
Kaiser Wilhelm Museum
Joseph-Beuys-Platz 1
47798 Krefeld
Germany
Haus Lange and Haus Esters*
Wilhelmshofallee 91-97
47800 Krefeld
*please note that in 2018, Haus Lange and Haus Esters will be closed to the public due to renovations
Christian Falsnaes
Force
March 23–June 24, 2018
Kaiser Wilhelm Museum
Danish artist Christian Falsnaes (b. 1980 Copenhagen) belongs to a new generation of artists whose performance-based, participatory approach has been attracting international attention. For the first time, this radical artist’s work is the subject of a major museum survey show. Falsnaes creates scenarios, game forms and settings that directly associate and implicate the public. Through his work, which often evolves during the course of his exhibitions, he examines the mechanics of power and obedience. To what extent are instructions followed? When are boundaries transgressed? For his exhibition in Krefeld, Falsnaes will create a constellation of interactive spaces, including two new, major commissions. The artist will regularly be present in order to execute the actions with visitors, in the very museum where 50 years earlier Joseph Beuys developed one of his most seminal, performative works Kunst = Mensch.
Peter Behrens
The Practical and the Ideal
May 18–October 14, 2018
Kaiser Wilhelm Museum
On the occasion of Peter Behrens 150th anniversary, the Kunstmuseen Krefeld, the MAK in Cologne and the LVR Industriemuseum Oberhausen have teamed up with three exhibitions that render homage to one of the founding fathers of modernism: Peter Behrens. An artist by training, he made a lasting impact as an architect, graphic designer, typographer and product designer.
Behrens enjoyed a privileged relationship with Krefeld and the founding director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Museum, Friedrich Deneken, who strove to apply the Werkbund spirit in Krefeld. Deneken positioned the newly inaugurated museum, originally focussed on both the fine and the applied arts, as a catalyst between the arts and society, thus sharing Behrens goal to harmonise the practical and the ideal, and reflecting the general spirit of the Werkbund and the Reform movement. The exhibition draws on the Kunstsmuseen Krefeld’s extensive Behrens holdings and archives, much of which is being shown for the first time.
The exhibition architecture is realized in collaboration with the Peter Behrens School of Arts Düsseldorf.
Idea to Form
Domeau & Pérès: Design and Craftsmanship
May 18–October 14, 2018
Kaiser Wilhelm Museum
The Werkbund’s founding principle encouraging collaborations between art, industry and craft that foster excellence and innovation in the applied arts was at the core of the Kaiser Wilhelm Museum’s exhibition and collection-building strategy in its early years and continues to resonate deeply today. For the first time in nearly a century, the Kunstmuseen Krefeld are relaunching an active exhibition and collection-building strategy in the field of the applied arts. On occasion of their generous donation, the exhibition Idea to Form. Domeau & Pérès: Design and Craftmanship will highlight the productive relationship between these exceptional French craftsmen and major contemporary designers—including Ronan & Erwan Bouroullec, Christophe Pillet, matali crasset, Martin Szekely, Eric Jourdan, Michael Young and Odil Decq—retracing the creative process from the first sketches and protoypes to the final products. The exhibition will resituate the dialogues between design, craft and industry within the collection.
The graphic design and exhibition design is realized in collaboration with the design department of the Hochschule Niederrhein.
Tailored for Freedom:
The Artistic Dress in 1900 in Fashion, Art and Society
October 12, 2018–February 24, 2019
Kaiser Wilhelm Museum
This ambitious exhibition will for the first time examine a key moment in the history of fashion, when artists and architects developed a radical, new vision for dress that liberated the female body. The unity of art and life at the base of the Reform movement around 1900 motivated artists and architects to include women’s dresses into their innovative aesthetic design experiments. They introduced their ideas to the public in a groundbreaking exhibition at the Kaiser Wilhelm Museum in 1900, which serves as the point of departure of Tailored for Freedom. The exhibition will present the artistic dress as a part of the Gesamtkunstwerk idea within the socio-political context of the European Reform movement and will include fashion, paintings, sculptures, applied arts, photography, dance and advertising notably from German reform movement centres, the Wiener Werkstätte, the British Arts and Crafts movement and Paul Poiret.
Volker Döhne
Seekers and Finders
November 16, 2018–April 14, 2019
Kaiser Wilhelm Museum
Seekers and Finders is the first museum survey exhibition dedicated to the work of German photographer Volker Döhne (b. 1953 Remscheid). Like Andreas Gursky, Thomas Struth, Candida Höfer or Thomas Ruff, Volker Döhne belongs to the first generation of “Becher Schüler,” the legendary class lead by Bernd and Hilla Becher at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf which gave rise to the so-called Düsseldorf school of photography. Since the 1970s, Döhne, has developed a singular oeuvre which builds upon the “Becher” principles, but with an unexpected twist. The exhibition will highlight certain key work groups that reflect his perceptive eye for unexpected details, his research-oriented, socio-cultural analysis of the Rhineland and the Ruhr area as well as his great talent as a storyteller through the photographic lense. The exhibition will also include a selection of catalogues and print media designed by Döhne, who initially trained as a graphic designer and typographer, highlighting for the first time the connections between graphic design and photography in his work.
Collection Satellite Series:
In 2018, the Kunstmuseen Krefeld are launching a new, interdisciplinary “project space” exhibition series aimed at inciting a new, dynamic dialogue between the artist and the museum. The collection in particular, with its great depth and diversity, will act as a catalyst for these experimental new projects by artists from different creative realms (ie art, design, graphic design, dance), and which are set in a variable time-space framework.
Sammlungssatellit #1
Volker Döhne
Spring–Winter 2018
A photography project on Haus Lange and Haus Esters in the public space, Krefeld
Sammlungssatellit #2
Bik Van Der Pol
November 16, 2018–April 14, 2019
Kaiser Wilhelm Museum
Press material can be found here.
