After more than a year of alterations and renovations, the Icon Museum in Frankfurt am Main, a dependance of the Museum Angewandte Kunst, is reopening with an entirely new exhibition space and concept. Under the direction of Matthias Wagner K and the curatorial leadership of Konstanze Runge the museum places the relationship between people and icons at the centre of focus in its completely renewed exhibition.
The new exhibition concept
By including the foyer, the exhibition space could be expanded considerably. The foyer therefore becomes, in relation to both space and content, the starting point for the new permanent exhibition. It is here that the origin, distribution, manifold materiality, and visual language of icons are so brilliantly conveyed. This initial area is followed by the main space, where a greater immersion in the world of icons is made possible. This is achieved, on the one hand, through the roles of meaning and function pertaining to the icons in the Church and in domestic space and, on the other hand, in how the portrayals of the lives and Passions of Jesus and Mary are narratively staged. Whereas the main space is primarily dedicated to the presentation of the icons in an ecclesiastical context, the gallery’s intimate atmosphere contains an overwhelming sense of privacy. It is here that visitors encounter a host of saints, including the particularly revered Saint Nicholas and Saint George. Following extensive conservation and restoration measures, the 130 selected icons and religious objects reveal an entirely fresh magnificence. At the same time, the rather typical traces of use were carefully conserved as a sign of the relationship between people and their icons. The icons are presented mostly without glass and at eye level. It is mainly the valuable and metal icons as well as small objects that are protected by glass and showcases.
The new presentation and spatial concept
Visitors can now discover the icons and other religious objects from Russia, Greece, Romania or Ethiopia in a completely fresh exhibition context, which was developed for gaining a direct experience of the sacred works of art. The room-within-a-room idea, which has been adapted to the requirements of the new permanent exhibition, picks up on the squares of Oswald Mathias Ungers’ postmodern architecture from the end of the 20th century and extends them horizontally and vertically. Through recesses, varying height dimensions, inclines, and projections, a change in this architecture is still possible. The elements are freestanding in that there are no direct wall connections and, while the historical architecture and Ungers’ modern architecture are partly visible, they are nonetheless always perceptible. The unrestrained, actually quite intensive monochrome colour scheme of the exhibition architecture, as well as the newly designed glass-free display cabinets, stand in clear contrast to the whiteness of the building architecture. The highly pigmented colour forms an intentional lacklustre, yet extremely corporeal surface that brings the religious artworks to the fore—almost as though they were floating—and, together with the specially designed lighting and ultra-modern LED technology, creates an aesthetic basis for the staging of a new approach to content in the permanent exhibition.
In a city with more than 14 Orthodox Christian churches and characterised by rich cultural diversity, the Icon Museum wishes not only to be a place for the preservation of cultural heritage, but also to be a space of encounter to which all are invited and which contributes to a successful coexistence of peoples from different cultural, religious and non-religious backgrounds.
Director: Matthias Wagner K
Curator: Konstanze Runge
Press contact: Natali-Lina Pitzer, presse.angewandte-kunst [at] stadt-frankfurt.de / T +49 (0)69 212 75339
