Exhibitions in 2017

Gerhard Richter: New Paintings
February 9–May 1, 2017

Since the late 1970s, abstract pictures have dominated Gerhard Richter’s wide-ranging oeuvre. This exhibition features new abstract paintings created in 2016 alongside works from the collection of the Museum Ludwig.
Curator: Rita Kersting

Otto Freundlich: Cosmic Communism
February 18–May 14, 2017

He is one of the most original abstract artists of the 20th century. Nearly 40 years after his last retrospective, the Museum Ludwig is presenting the work of the sculptor and painter Otto Freundlich. In mosaics and stained-glass windows, he took up a collective art of the past and brought it into the future. While the art world elite paid their respects to him in 1938, the Nazis denounced him in their “Entartete Kunst” (“degenerate art”) exhibition. Many of his works were destroyed. The works gathered in this exhibition are thus all the more impressive.
Curator: Julia Friedrich

2017 Wolfgang Hahn Prize: Trisha Donnelly
April 25–July 30, 2017
Award ceremony and opening: Monday, April 24, 7pm

In 2017 the Gesellschaft für Moderne Kunst will award the Wolfgang Hahn Prize to Trisha Donnelly in honor of her pioneering oeuvre. “The extraordinary generosity of Donnelly’s work, which touches on the visual—in particular the photographic—the spoken, the aural, and the physical, is electrifying in its permission,” says Suzanne Cotter, director of the Serralves Museum of contemporary art in Porto and this year’s guest juror.

HERE AND NOW at Museum Ludwig: Reena Spaulings
June 3–August 27, 2017

Since 2004 Reena Spaulings has appeared as an artist, gallerist, and literary character. The roles in which she—and the artist collective behind her name—acts are intertwined. With this strategy, Spaulings undermines the art system’s division of labor and blurs conventional hierarchies. Yet her artistic focus lies decidedly on painting, which she augments with performances and opens with collaborations. Her working method involves an engagement with various aspects associated with the location and time of each exhibition.
Curator: Anna Czerlitzki

Bring Art into Life! The Collector Wolfgang Hahn and the 1960s
June 24–September 24, 2017

In the 1960s the Rhineland was an important center of a revolutionary development in art: a new, internationally connected generation of artists rebelled against traditional art. They used everyday life as a source of inspiration and everyday objects as the materials for their works. They broke down the boundaries of art disciplines and worked with musicians, writers, filmmakers, and dancers. At the epicenter of this exceptional time, the Cologne restorer Wolfgang Hahn began to acquire new artworks and assemble them into a multilayered collection with examples of Nouveau Réalisme, Fluxus, Happenings, Pop Art, and Conceptual Art.
Curators: Barbara Engelbach (Museum Ludwig), Susanne Neuburger (mumok)

Werner Mantz: Architectures and People
October 14, 2017–January 21, 2018

He is known as a photographer of the Neues Bauen movement of modernist architecture in Germany: while Wilhelm Riphahn and other architects carried out Konrad Adenauer’s housing policy as part of the modernization of Cologne, Werner Mantz (1901–1983) was commissioned to photograph their buildings. It was these images that made Cologne’s modernist architecture renowned beyond the boundaries of the city. In 1932 Mantz opened a second studio in Maastricht, where he returned to his early subject of portrait photography and specialized in portraits of children. The Museum Ludwig will now bring together these two aspects of his oeuvre, allowing visitors to experience Mantz’s work in its historical breadth and diversity for the first time ever.
Curators: Miriam Halwani (Museum Ludwig), Frits Gierstberg (Nederlands Fotomuseum)

James Rosenquist: Painting as Immersion
November 18, 2017–March 11, 2018

In a major exhibition by James Rosenquist (*1933), for the first time ever the Museum Ludwig will present works by this renowned representative of American Pop Art in the context of their cultural, social, and political dimensions. Along with archive materials and documents designated by the artist as source materials, some of which have not previously been exhibited, the show will reveal a historical cosmos. After all, James Rosenquist’s compositions are to a large extent the result of his marked interest in the political events of his time.
Curators: Stephan Diederich, Yilmaz Dziewior

Contact:
Anne Niermann / Sonja Hempel, Press and Public Relations
T +49 (0)221 221 23491 / niermann [​at​] museum-ludwig.de / hempel [​at​] museum-ludwig.de