Ackermans at K 21
Thomas W. Kuhn
When the K 21 museum first opened its doors to the public in 2002, it was an institution without much of its own collection. Interestingly, its sister museum K 20 started as a collection without a museum. When Werner Schmalenbach started to build up a state collection for modern and contemporary art in D�sseldorf by buying 60 works by Paul Klee, the collection had no home at all. It was 1986 when Schmalenbach could move into the collection’s own museum, an elegantly curved black monolith by Danish architects Dissing & Weitling: the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen. Undersized from the very beginning, today the collection is still waiting for an annex to the museum to present its ever-growing collection. A new opportunity came up when the state decided to offer its now defunct Parliament building to the museum. By then the new director of the Kunstsammlung, Armin Zweite, had the idea to split the collection historically into "art of the 20th century" in the older building, renamed to K 20, and "art of the 21st century" in the parliament building, called K 21. For the collection Zweite set the dividing line at the year 1980, marking the transition from modern to postmodern art.
When the new branch opened in 2002 the space was heavily dominated by three major private collections on loan: Ackermans, Speck and Sch�rmann. This was due to the fact that the state collection was short of works created after 1980. The private collectors filled the gap, like they do in many German museums with consistently decreasing funds. The heterogeneous presentation contained works from the likes of Sigmar Polke, Martin Kippenberger or Gregor Schneider. At the time there was a debate about whether Julian Heynen, the artistic director in charge of the K21, or the private collectors made the crucial decisions in the selection process. Some journalists were afraid that the K 21 participated in the oft-criticized revaluation of art in private collections.
The situation changed in 2004, when the state collection had the unique chance to acquire the collection of Simone and Heinz Ackermans, who have been collecting contemporary art ever since 1986. The couple was in a process of rebuilding their assets facing the consequences of a state tax legacy. The tax was paid for with a large contingent of the Ackermans’ collection. Because of that, Julian Heynen and his team worked out a new presentation that opened on July 2 titled "Collection 2005".
Many rooms were given to single artists like Paul McCarthy, Iim Knoebel or Christian Boltanski. The most impressing room is Reinhard Mucha’s Deutschlandger�t (Germany Device), from 1990. The work was originally a contribution to the German pavilion at the Venice Biennial of that year. Now Deutschlandger�t is on display in what has been the former plenar hall. The artist extended the installation made of felt, vitrines, chairs and tables with additional videos. The atmosphere is dominated by a droning sound that causes the glass panes of the installation to vibrate. In other rooms Julian Heynen and curator Doris Krystof combined two or three artists, like Thomas Ruff’s photo series of the stellar skies from 1990 and Juan Mu?oz’s crowd of sculptures of smiling Chinese men in Plaza from 1996. Formal principles were applied in combining serial works by Hilla and Bernd Becher with a minimalist Donald Judd sculpture.
On top of the building, protected by a sphere made of glass, monumental sculptures by Franz West, Tony Craig and Thomas Schuette are grouped with a loan from the private collection of Christian Boros, Olafur Eliasson’s Your Spiral View, and an intervention piece by Tino Sehgal.
Current video installations by Shirin Neshat, Steve McQueen, Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Rodney Graham and Tony Oursler are being flanked by pioneers of the medium. Marina Abramovic, Marcel Odenbach and Peter Campus lead back to the performance and body-art traditions of the 70s. Placed alongside the video pieces are photographic series like Lucinda Devlin’s startling Omega suite, Katharina Sieverding’s Stauffenberg-Block I-XVI/1969 from 1969/96, artificial interiors by Thomas Demand and buildings by Thomas Ruff. Sculpture is present with three casts of bookshelves by Rachel Whiteread.
The general impression of the new presentation is light and airy. Starting the trip through the museum in the basement, it becomes visible how much the collection gained in quality by being presented in an intellectual and sensitive way.
While the K 21 is still a place of diversity, visitors can now follow a subtle thread guiding through the house: artists working on the subject of identity in a time that is reality-impaired.
An obvious quality of the new presentation is that the artistic director, Julian Heynen, has worked with most of these artists for years, especially those who live and work in the vicinity, like Thomas Ruff and Thomas Schuette. And since Julian Heynen has also been responsible for the German contribution to Venice Biennial two times in a row, it looks like D�sseldorf’s K 21 is, for now, the most important hot spot for contemporary art in Germany.
