#Archive

On the three levels of the museum, the exhibition also covers three content aspects. Level 1 offers space for visitors’ own associations and memories. Level 2 focuses on the work of Edward S. Curtis and presents around 60 pictures from his encyclopaedia, The North American Indian. Will Wilson gives a contemporary response to this with his Talking Tintypes, which can be seen together with further photographic and video works on level 3.

The oeuvre of the Irish-American artist Sean Scully is one of the most important positions in contemporary painting. His equally abstract and expressive works develop a fascinating presence and radiance in space. The exhibition at the KUNSTWERK Sammlung Klein presents a selection of paintings and graphic works as well as a sculpture by Sean Scully and directs its focus on object-like, physical aspects also in the artist’s painterly oeuvre as well.

In the exhibition Vertauschte Köpfe (Transposed Heads), KUNSTWERK Sammlung Klein in Eberdingen-Nussdorf is displaying central groups of pieces and current works by Andreas und Konrad Mühe. Examining the connecting link in the obviously different, this is the first joint project produced by the brothers, who live in Berlin.

In the presentation of new acquisitions and classics from the Klein collection, the Zwischenzeit (Meantime) exhibition offers an associative, harmonious resonating space to deal with the crisis. How do we handle situations in which everything is suddenly uncertain and very little seems to be truly predictable? How do our perspectives change, when we leave our familiar routines and are placed back entirely on our own? Such questions form mental parentheses between the exhibits and on the first two floors at KUNSTWERK, which were set up back in spring 2021 – under lockdown conditions. With the prospect of reopening the museum in June, final additions were made to the exhibition. The mood of the summer, characterised by renewed optimism, is therefore reflected on level 3.

The foundation prize for photographic art from the Alison and Peter Klein foundation highlights the special importance of contemporary photography in Sammlung Klein (the Klein collection). It comes with the award of 10,000 euros and is set up as a sponsorship prize for young artists who live and work in Germany. This year, it will be awarded for the fifth time. The subject, Present | Memory gives a clue to the content here.

For many people, pictures from the deserts of central Australia dabbed on canvas with acrylic paints have become the epitome of Aboriginal art. Hängung #21 now places them side by side with very different works from the tropical north: barks or tree trunks painted with earth pigments.

In Hängung #20, for the first time, KUNSTWERK presented works from Polynesia. Around thirty bark cloths produced in the 19^th and 20^th centuries come from Samoa and Tonga, Futuna, Niue and the Fiji Islands. A look to the present here led to New Zealand, for example in the works of Darryn George and John Pule, whose paintings reflect elements of Pacific history and culture.

The paths in abstract painting today are more diverse than ever. They are are no longer subject to the formation of groups or schools, there is no ideological programme. The choice of frame of reference in which the artistic examination moves is made individually. The three positions of Hängung #19 can therefore also not be captured under one common denominator. Three names, which stand for three artistic concepts of abstract work, form the title of the exhibition.

After the jubilee events of 2017 at KUNSTWERK and at Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, the collectors and curator agreed on a break with an exhibition that stands back from the previously obligatory reference to their own collection and offers space for new perspectives under altered structural conditions. It presents works by Julius von Bismarck, Katja Ka, Umschichten, Sinta Werner and Rolf Wicker.

In 2017, KUNSTWERK celebrated its tenth anniversary. To begin the anniversary year and in reference to the first exhibition in 2007, which presented photographs from the Klein collection, the Alison and Peter Klein foundation creates a highlight of its own by once again awarding the foundation prize for photographic art.