Exhibitions in 2019

January 19–April 14, 2019
Hockney/Hamilton: Expanded Graphics
New Acquisitions and Works from the Collection, with Two Films by James Scott
Curator: Julia Friedrich

Films about art can make art seem small and banal, but they can also expand and enlarge it—like the first films by the British art film pioneer James Scott (*1941). The Museum Ludwig will bring them into a dialogue with the works they feature: David Hockney’s Illustrations for Fourteen Poems by C.P. Cavafy (1966–67) and works by Richard Hamilton. The Cologne-based collectors Herbert Meyer-Ellinger and Christoph Vowinckel donated this series of works by Hockney to the museum in 2016. Now it is being exhibited for the first time, along with works on paper by Hockney and Hamilton from the collection, supplemented with loans from private collections.

March 3–June 2, 2019
Nil Yalter
Exile Is a Hard Job
Curator: Rita Kersting

Since the 1970s, Nil Yalter has been working as a pioneer of socially engaged and technically advanced art. In painterly collages as well as montages and videos, the Turkish artist integrates photos, drawings, and reports by workers and migrants. Her strong engagement with the topics of feminism, migration, and repression lead have led to a rediscovery of the eighty-year-old artist by international museums and collections over the past five years. She integrates the voices of the subjects of her works in a unique way and finds a consistently persuasive aesthetic form. In 2019, the Museum Ludwig will now host the Turkish artist’s first major survey exhibition.

The exhibition is organized by the Museum Ludwig in cooperation with the Center for Curatorial Studies, Hessel Museum, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York.

April 10–July 21, 2019
Jac Leirner
2019 Wolfgang Hahn Prize

In 2019, the Gesellschaft für Moderne Kunst am Museum Ludwig is awarding the Wolfgang Hahn Prize to Jac Leirner. For many years now, the work of the Brazilian artist (b. 1961 in São Paulo, Brazil) has engaged in a subtle analysis of social and representational systems. Found, often industrially produced everyday objects play an important role here; following the principle of collecting, accumulating, and classifying, Leirner uses them to create installations, collages, and sculptures.

April 5–August 11, 2019
Fiona Tan: GAAF
Part of the Artists Meets Archive Series
Curator: Miriam Halwani

Video artist and filmmaker Fiona Tan (b. 1966 in Pekanbaru, India, lives in Amsterdam, Netherlands) will work with the archive of the Agfa advertising department, which has been packed away in storage at the Museum Ludwig for 40 years. It includes tens of thousands of photographs, slides, and negatives collected since the 1920s. The artist is particularly interested in the promotional photos taken with the legendary Agfacolor film. In Dutch, the title of the exhibition GAAF—an anagram of Agfa—means “perfect” and alludes to the colorful, staged world of the photographs, which show the euphoria of the postwar “economic miracle” in Germany.

July 13–September 29, 2019
Family Ties
The Schröder Donation
Curator: Barbara Engelbach

In the 1990s, a new art scene formed in Cologne: new galleries were opened by the likes of Christian Nagel, the magazine Texte zur Kunst was founded, and an artist collective ran the alternative exhibition space Friesenwall 120. The Rhineland—in an intensive exchange with New York—developed into one of the intellectual centers of the decade. Alexander Schröder followed these developments from Berlin. Today Schröder’s collection exemplifies the idiosyncratic and sensual side of the 1990s and 2000s, which were shaped by Conceptual Art. It demonstrates the significance of artist groups and collaborations in changing constellations at the time. Now Alexander Schröder has donated substantial works from his collection to the Museum Ludwig by artists such as Kai Althoff, Cosima von Bonin, Tom Burr, Lukas Duwenhögger, Isa Genzken, and Danh Võ. The exhibition will present them to the public along with works from the museum’s collection, with a focus on art at the turn of the 21st century.

September 21, 2019–January 19, 2020
HERE AND NOW at Museum Ludwig
Transcorporealities
Curator: Leonie Radine

Under the title Transcorporealities, the fifth exhibition in the HERE AND NOW at Museum Ludwig series is dedicated to the complexity of corporeality. Certain new materialist and posthumanist theories assume that all bodies are porous, open systems that constantly interchange with other bodies and their environment. This idea of “transcorporeality” could also be applied to the museum: instead of a hermetic fortress and temple of an art-historical canon, it can be understood as a permeable body that defines and transforms itself as a living organism in a perpetual metabolic process through external influences. In this sense, the exhibition will activate a transitional space of the museum: international artists and collectives will turn the foyer into a nimble exhibition space with a stage for performance, dance, artistic research, discussion, and dialogue. All works and contributions are linked by an examination of corporeal processes of transformation and the permeable boundaries between nature and culture, humans and machines, or individuals and the environment. 

November 16, 2019–January 3, 2020
Wade Guyton
Curator: Yilmaz Dziewior
Curatorial Assistant: Leonie Radine

Born in 1972, the US-American artist Wade Guyton has created a conceptually consistent and refreshingly idiosyncratic oeuvre for more than two decades. He is best known for his large-scale canvas paintings made with a conventional inkjet printer, with iconic motifs such as flames, the letters X and U, and front pages of The New York Times website. After acquiring several of the artist’s works for the collection, the Museum Ludwig is hosting a major survey exhibition in 2019 that will present his oeuvre from the beginning of his career to his most recent works. Guyton plays a key role in the artistic engagement with images in the digital age. He combines traditional visual media, such as primed canvas, with digital printing processes so that deliberate degradations lead to aesthetically astonishing results. On the occasion of the exhibition, a full catalogue of the artist’s solo exhibitions will be published with texts by Johanna Burton, Yilmaz Dziewior, Michelle Kuo, and Kerstin Stakemeier.

Schultze Projects #2: Avery Singer
From October 11, 2019

Photography Room Presentations

June 7–September 22, 2019
Benjamin Katz: Berlin Havelhöhe, 1960
Curator: Barbara Engelbach

Recently, the Museum Ludwig was able to acquire the important series of photographs Berlin Havelhöhe (1960) by Benjamin Katz. Suffering from tuberculosis, Katz spent one and a half years in the Havelhöhe hospital in Berlin and photographed the patients’ daily life as well as the hospital grounds and buildings, which were originally used by the Nazi Reichsakademie for the Luftwaffe. The photographs represent a social as well as an artistic document, since they record Katz’s beginnings as a photographer.

October 12, 2019–February 2, 2020
Lucia Moholy: Writing Photography’s History
Curator: Miriam Halwani

On the occasion of the anniversary of the Bauhaus, we will recount how the photographer Lucia Moholy rewrote the history of photography. In addition to her photographs, the Museum Ludwig archives include letters that demonstrate her lively exchange with the photography collector and historian Erich Stenger. Together they planned to write a book about  the history of photography. However, the rise of the Nazis drove Moholy into emigration, while Stenger became a sought-after expert in the field in Germany. Moholy ultimately published A Hundred Years of Photography on her own in London. The exhibition will cover this work as well as the relationship between Moholy’s writing and photography.