Exhibitions in 2020

January 18, 2020–May 3, 2020
Blinky Palermo: The Complete Editions
Ulrich Reininghaus Donation

Peter Heisterkamp (1943–1977), whose artist’s name was taken from the mafioso Frank “Blinky” Palermo, is known for his large fabric and metal pictures as well as his objects and installations. Less well known yet no less interesting are works he created in editions: screen prints and offset prints, lithographs, objects, and a template for painting. They not only reflect Palermo’s development from the 1960s to his early death in 1977, but also show how the artist deliberately expanded his work with the possibilities of reproduction.

Thanks to a donation from the Cologne collector Ulrich Reininghaus, since 2018 the Museum Ludwig has had all of Palermo’s editions. They will now be presented for the first time and will undergo a scholarly review.

Curator: Julia Friedrich

#MLxBlinkyPalermo

April 22, 2020–July 26, 2020
Betye Saar: 2020 Wolfgang Hahn Prize

Betye Saar will be awarded the 26th Wolfgang Hahn Prize from the Gesellschaft für Moderne Kunst. This recognition of the artist, who was born in Los Angeles in 1926 and is still little known in Germany, is highly timely, the jury consisting of Yilmaz Dziewior, director of the Museum Ludwig; Christophe Cherix, Robert Lehman Foundation chief curator of drawings and prints at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York; and the board members of the association decided. Betye Saar has been creating assemblages from a wide variety of found objects, which she combines with drawing, prints, painting, and photography. Guest juror Christophe Cherix on Betye Saar: “Betye Saar’s work occupies a pivotal position in American art. Her assemblages from the 1960s and early 1970s interweave issues of race, politics, and supernatural belief systems with her personal history. Having grown up in a racially segregated society, Saar has long held that art can transcend our darkest moments and deepest fears. Today, the emergence of a new generation of artists mining her poignant legacy attests to how profoundly Saar has changed the course of American art. The 2020 Wolfgang Hahn Prize not only acknowledges her extraordinary achievements and influence, but also recognizes the need to revisit how the history of art in recent decades has been written.”

#MLxBetyeSaar #WHP2020

April 25, 2020–August 23, 2020
Mapping the Collection

Equality, indigenous self-determination, women’s rights, and Black Power: the exhibition Mapping the Collection takes a close look at the 1960s and 1970s in the United States. It asks how artists reacted to the social developments and upheavals of these decades—and what ideas about art from this time have shaped our memory.

Based on social developments such as the civil rights movement in the United States, the Chicano Movement, gay liberation, and the struggle for indigenous rights, which shaped these two influential decades, the exhibition presents artworks from the collection of the Museum Ludwig alongside those by artists of indigenous, African-American, and Latin-American origins who are not yet represented in the collection of the Museum Ludwig. The result is a complex and surprising view of American twentieth-century art. At the same time, Mapping the Collection raises questions about representation and self-determination that are as relevant today as they were then—in the United States and in Germany. The exhibition evolved out of a research project initiated in 2018 by the Museum Ludwig with support from the Terra Foundation for American Art. Over the course of two years, the project examines the collection of American art with regard to postcolonial and colonial, feminist, queer, and gender-theoretical issues.

Curator: Janice Mitchell

#mappingthecollection

June 6, 2020–August 30, 2020
HERE AND NOW at Museum Ludwig: Dynamic Spaces

Artists: Contemporary And, The Nest Collective, CUSS & Vukani Ndebele,
Nkiruka Oparah, Frida Orupabo

For the sixth exhibition in the series HERE AND NOW at Museum Ludwig, the museum is collaborating with the art magazine Contemporary And. Founded by Yvette Mutumba and Julia Grosse, C& sees itself as “a dynamic space for issues and information on contemporary art from Africa and its Global Diaspora.” The multilingual website is a hub for diverse activities, and a printed magazine is published twice a year. At the Museum Ludwig, the long-term project C& Center of Unfinished Business will be the focus of the exhibition. It is a participatory library that uses videos and publications to make the traces of colonial power relations and their effects up to the present day visible.

The Cologne version of the C& Center of Unfinished Business is based on its location. The library architecture developed for the museum space brings together C&’s own collection and publications from the Kunst- und Museumsbibliothek Köln selected by C&. The project thus creates dynamic connections to the museum, its location, and its visitors. The exhibition also includes video works by African artist collectives from the series C& Commissions as well as works by artists from the African Diaspora. These, too, open up dynamic spaces full of images that deal with current experiences of black identity, reveal exclusionary perspectives, and offer new designs against stereotypical ideas.

Curator: Romina Dümler

#HIERUNDJETZT #dynamischeraeume

September 26, 2020– January 3, 2021
Russian Avant-Garde at the Museum Ludwig: Original and Fake

After a long period during which the subject was taboo, an increasing number of museums are opening up to a transparent accounting of counterfeit works, exchanging insights, and, if necessary, writing off works from their collections. With a concentrated studio exhibition, the Museum Ludwig is also posing questions about authenticity using the example of the Russian avant-garde. In addition to Pop Art and Picasso, this is one of the focuses of the museum’s collection, with more than 800 works from the period between 1905 and 1930, including some 100 paintings.

For various reasons, works of questionable authorship have continually found their way into private and institutional collections. The Museum Ludwig is also affected and is currently investigating its collection with the help of international scholars. The exhibition will present the initial findings as well as art-historical and technological methods for making artistic authorship or false attributions recognizable, with works by Natalia Goncharova, Kliment Redko, Nikolai Suetin, and other artists.

Curators: Rita Kersting and Petra Mandt

#originalandfake

October 10, 2020–February 21, 2021
Andy Warhol: Now

Andy Warhol (1928–1987) captivated and polarized people with his personality, and his art shaped an entire era. His multifaceted work redefined the boundaries of painting, sculpture, film, and music. As a shy young man from a religious, working-class milieu, Warhol carved his own path into the art world, which was still dominated by Abstract Expressionism. In his early work, personal, often homoerotic drawings stood alongside commissions as a successful advertising illustrator, while his unmistakable screen prints made him the epitome of the new Pop Art movement. He had a lifelong fascination for popular culture. But just as his celebrity portraits and Coca-Cola bottles held a mirror to American society, Warhol stands for a diverse, queer counterculture that found its expression not least in his New York studio, the Factory.                       

This major exhibition illuminates Warhol’s expanded artistic practice against the backdrop of pressing social issues with over 100 works. Key works such as the Elvis Presley series and colorful variations of an electric chair are represented as well as less well-known aspects, which allow for a current view of this artist of the century in a time of political and cultural upheavals. It also illuminates his development as the son of Russian immigrants in Pittsburgh, which is reflected in a complex processing of religious themes and subjects, among other things.

Curators at Museum Ludwig: Stephan Diederich and Yilmaz Dziewior
For the Tate Modern: Gregor Muir, Director of the Collection of International Art, and Fiontán Moran, Assistant Curator

#MLxAndyWarhol #warholnow

Presentations in the Photography Room

February 15, 2020–June 14, 2020
Silent Ruins
F. A. Oppenheim Photographs Antiquity

The ruins of the Acropolis appear to stand silently in Felix Alexander Oppenheim’s photographs: no people are visible. In 1854 the large-format picture book Atheniensische Alterthümer was published, of which the Museum Ludwig holds one of two surviving copies. The much-cited “silent grandeur” of the ancient relics, as captured by Oppenheim, does not obscure the traces of looting and destruction, as well as archaeological recovery. For instance, in his introductory texts Oppenheim speaks of the “great mastery” of the ancient sculptures, while also citing “rummaging in foreign countries” and the “abduction” of sculptures. Now the entire album will be exhibited for the first time, thus revealing a moment in history when the enthusiasm for antiquity, early archeology, the politics of symbols in Greece, and the struggle for rightful ownership created a context rich in words and images for these silent ruins.

#MLxOppenheim #stilleruinen

June 27, 2020–September 27, 2020
Joachim Brohm: Ruhr Landscapes

The Museum Ludwig is presenting 11 works from the series Ruhr Landscapes by Joachim Brohm (*1955), photographed between 1981 and 1983. In this early series, Brohm already shows his independent photographic position, with which he opens up a new view of the region beyond the widespread stereotypical depictions of the Ruhr.

Brohm, who studied visual communications at the Folkwangschule in Essen from 1977 to 1983, saw these subjects as a documentation of “the combination of leisure offerings and the leisure industry.” He was inspired by the new American documentary photography, which no longer depicted heroic cities or sublime natural landscapes, but gas stations, parking lots, suburban neighborhoods, motels, and business parks in a natural landscape changed by human beings.

#MLxJoachimBrohm #ruhrlandschaften

October 24, 2020–January 24, 2021
Sisi in Private: The Empress’s Photo Albums

Empress Elisabeth of Austria-Hungary, called Sisi, collected photographs in the 1860s, but kept them private throughout her life. Today the Museum Ludwig holds eighteen of her albums with some 2000 photographs. They show the nobility—many of them members of Sisi’s family—as well as celebrities and artworks. The most renowned are from her “albums of beauties,” highly staged portraits of other women. Sisi used these photographs to shape her own image during her months-long stays in Venice, Madeira, and Corfu. In these years she matured into a more energetic, self-confident figure whose beauty became legendary. In the late 1860s, at the age of 31, Sisi decided not to be photographed anymore. The presentation outlines the connections between her almost obsessive collecting of portraits of women and the image of herself that she created.

#MLxSisi