Exhibition program 2023

The role of art and design as a mirror and driver of production conditions and social change is at the heart of the museum’s program for 2023. The Kunstmuseen Krefeld are using the 650th anniversary year of the city’s founding as an opportunity to further explore their signature terrain, continuing to combine reassessments of their own collection and history with the questions and challenges of the present. “Since its founding in 1897, the Kaiser Wilhelm Museum—with the later addition of Haus Lange and Haus Esters—has been a leading venue for contemporary culture and innovative ideas,” says director Katia Baudin. “From the beginning, the museum worked together with local, regional, and international actors from a wide variety of fields. Today, the Kunstmuseen Krefeld remain a platform for interchange, encounters, and open dialogue with the various communities that make up the city and beyond.”

Productive Spaces: Art and Design from Krefeld
March 26–September 10, 2023
Haus Lange Haus Esters

In 2023, the 650th anniversary year of the city’s founding, Kunstmuseen Krefeld will organize a major exhibition project showcasing contemporary artistic and design positions in the internationally renowned Lange and Esters Houses. Invited will be artists and designers of all generations and fields who live in Krefeld and its environs or whose approaches have been shaped by spending a long period of time in the city. Including works in various genres and media the exhibition will offer a wide-ranging look at the city’s creative output. Under the title Productive Spaces, the exhibition illuminates current artistic production in the city from a thematic vantage point. Whether the spaces in question are social, political, communicative, economic, or virtual, landscapes or spaces of thought, the exhibition examines artistic and design approaches to space from various perspectives. While art will be displayed in Haus Lange, Haus Esters will be devoted to protagonists from the field of design.

Curators: Katia Baudin, Magdalena Holzhey, Thomas Janzen, Sylvia Martin
Advisory Committee for the Design Field: Kerstin Plüm, Wienke Treblin, Tom Turowski

Sarah Morris: All Systems Fail
October 15, 2023–March 10, 2024

The solo exhibition All Systems Fail by internationally celebrated artist Sarah Morris (b. 1967, Sevenoaks, UK, based in New York) offers a survey of thirty years of her work at Haus Lange and Haus Esters, exploring the connections she forges between abstraction, architecture, modernism, art and design. Since the 1990s, Sarah Morris has been creating a multilayered body of work, which includes paintings, films, prints, and wall paintings that, taken together, reflect her interest in networks, typologies, globalization, cities and architecture. Her works are literally always details of grids, architectures, and cities and shifting, personal perspectives. Through the encounter of reality and abstraction, Morris produces images that are socially coded as well as emotionally communicative. Sarah Morris’ art explores spaces, images, power relations and reflects its own position as influenced by external factors. In addition to international loans, the show will also include artworks specially developed for Haus Lange Haus Esters as well as an excursus at the Kaiser Wilhelm Museum.

The exhibition is organized by Deichtorhallen Hamburg in cooperation with Kunstmuseen Krefeld, Zentrum Paul Klee Bern, and Kunstmuseum Stuttgart.

Curator Kunstmuseen Krefeld: Juliane Duft

Karl Ernst Osthaus and the German Museum of Art in Trade and Commerce
November 24, 2023–April 21, 2024
Kaiser Wilhelm Museum

In 1923, an ensemble of several thousand works was aquired by the Kaiser Wilhelm Museum in Krefeld: the Deutsches Museum für Kunst in Handel und Gewerbe (German Museum of Art in Trade and Commerce), perhaps the very first collection of design. It continues to this day to form the heart of the museum’s collection in the field of applied art. It is a sample collection of exemplary design assembled by the Hagen-based patron and collector Karl Ernst Osthaus between 1909 and 1919 with the support of the Deutscher Werkbund. The aims of the Deutsches Museum were as ambitious as they were universal: to design the whole of everyday life according to modern aesthetic principles. While Osthaus’s art collections went to Essen, his design holdings went to Krefeld, where it perfectly complements the museum concept of the Kaiser Wilhelm Museum, which is rooted in the spirit of the reform movement. Beginning in November 2023, the Kunstmuseen Krefeld will celebrate the hundred-year anniversary of this important collection’s acquisition with a major exhibition and accompanying catalogue.

Curators: Ina Ewers-Schultz, Magdalena Holzhey

Collection in Motion
Beginning in March, new rooms for the permanent collection on the second floor
Kaiser Wilhelm Museum

In the coming year, the museum will also highlight the connection between local art and design and the international context with new additional rooms for its permanent collection - Collection in Motion. On March 2, 2023, new rooms for the collection will open their doors. Here, recently donated works by Krefeld-based artists will enter into dialogue with focal points of the collection. Collection in Motion permanently presents selected holdings on the first floor of the Kaiser Wilhelm Museum. A total of 15 different distinctive stories are strung together in 15 rooms.

Curator: Magdalena Holzhey

Collection of the Friends of the Kunstmuseen Krefeld e.V.
Friends of Art—40 Years of Collecting
April 29–October 15, 2023
29.04.2023–15.10.2023
Kaiser Wilhelm Museum

On the occasion of the fortieth anniversary of the Friends of the Kunstmuseen Krefeld e.V., the collection assembled through their commitment will be exhibited in 2023. Every year, the Friends support Kunstmuseen Krefeld with acquisitions of key works from exhibitions or with a close relationship to the collections. Artists such as Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke, Blinky Palermo, and Bruce Nauman stand alongside important younger artists such as Bethan Huws, Eva Kot’átková, and raumlaborberlin.

Director
Katia Baudin

Press and public relations
Fabienne Kylla
fabienne.kylla [​at​] krefeld.de

The Kunstmuseen Krefeld are a cultural institution of the city of Krefeld.