Public programming winter 2024

The George Economou Collection is delighted to announce a curated program of conversations that aims to engage audiences and foster an intellectual discourse around art and culture.

The George Economou Collection is a private contemporary art collection in Athens, Greece. Initiated in the 1990s with a focus on German Expressionism and Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity), the collection has since expanded to include major holdings in post-war and contemporary art. The George Economou Collection regularly makes loans to major exhibitions and supports a number of international museums.

Over the past decade, the George Economou Collection has presented exhibitions by seminal artists including Katharina Fritsch, David Hammons and Charles Ray while working closely with established museum professionals. The current exhibition, Sleep, Death’s Own Brother, by Canadian artist Steven Shearer fosters some of the themes that will be further explored in the conversation series.

Program
Face Value: Issues in Portraiture
With Ann Demeester 
Saturday, January 20, 2024, 7pm

New Objectivity and Photography: Documentary in Dispute 
Panel discussion with Christiane Lange, Jorge Ribalta, and Jeff Wall
Thursday, February 1, 2024, 7pm

Subculture as Paradigm
With Diedrich Diederichsen 
Friday, February 16, 2024, 7pm

New Encounters in Found Photography
A conversation between James Lingwood and Christin Müller
Saturday, February 24, 2024, 7pm

This conversation series is curated by Vassilios Doupas in collaboration with Skarlet Smatana, director of the George Economou Collection. RSVP essential due to limited capacity info [​at​] economoucollection.com

Notes to editors
Ann Demeester is the director of Kunsthaus Zürich, Switzerland’s largest art museum, with a collection that spans the thirteenth century to the present. She joined the institution at the beginning of 2023 with a mission to make it more artist-centric and inclusive. Prior to this role, she was the director of the Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem, Netherlands. From 2004–2014 she was director of the art center and curatorial program at de Appel in Amsterdam.

Prof. Dr. Christiane Lange has been a curator of the gallery at the Hypo-Kulturstiftung, Munich, and additionally held the position of director there from 2006–2012. She has been teaching at the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich since 2003 and received an honorary professorship in 2011. Since 2013, Prof. Dr. Lange has been serving as director of the Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart.

Jorge Ribalta is an independent curator, editor, and researcher who served as the head of public programs at the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art (MACBA) from 1999 through 2009. He has curated numerous photographic exhibitions including a 2005 survey of Jo Spence’s work for MACBA as well as A Hard, Merciless Light: The Worker Photography Movement (2011) and Not Yet. On the Reinvention of Documentary Photography and the Critique of Modernism (2015) for the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid.

Jeff Wall is a Canadian artist best known for his large-scale, backlit Cibachrome photographs and art historical writings. Early in his career he helped define the Vancouver School and he has published essays on the work of his colleagues and contemporaries Rodney Graham, Ken Lum, and Ian Wallace. Wall has contributed significantly to the establishment of photography as an autonomous medium and is regarded as a progenitor of “staged photography.” He currently has a solo exhibition at the Fondation Beyeler in Riehen, Switzerland until 21 April 2024.

Diedrich Diederichsen is an author, academic, and cultural critic. He is one of Germany’s most renowned intellectual writers at the crossroads of the arts, politics, and pop culture.

James Lingwood was until recently the codirector with Michael Morris of Artangel, London. Since 1991, Lingwood and Morris have commissioned and produced a series of notable site-specific works, including the Turner Prize-winning construction House (1993) by Rachel Whiteread; Michael Landy’s installation in a former boutique on Oxford Street in London, Break Down (2001); Gregor Schneider’s Die Familie Schneider (2004); Francis Alÿs’s Seven Walks (2005); Roni Horn’s installation in rural Iceland, Vatnasafn/Library of Water (2007); and Roger Hiorns’s Seizure (2008). In addition to his work with Artangel, Lingwood has curated exhibitions for national and international arts institutions including Juan Muñoz’s Double Bind (2001) in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall and Douglas Gordon’s What Have I Done (2002) at the Hayward Gallery in London. He has also organized major survey exhibitions with Vija Celmins, Julião Sarmento, Thomas Struth, and Thomas Schütte.

Christin Müller is an independent curator of photography. She has collaborated on projects with German organizations such as ifa (Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen), Stuttgart, Berlin; Wüstenrot Stiftung, Ludwigsburg; Museum Folkwang, Essen; neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst (nGbK), Berlin; C/O Berlin; and the Biennale für aktuelle Fotografie in addition to the Museum Rietberg and the Fotomuseum Winterthur in Switzerland. She is also a writer who has held several teaching appointments, the most recent of which have been at the Leipzig University and the Hochschule Hannover, University of Applied Sciences and Arts. She is a member of the International Council of Museums (ICOM), the German Photographic Association (DGPh), the German Association for Art History (Verband Deutscher Kunsthistoriker), nGbK, and VG Wort.