Kunstmuseen Krefeld presents its exhibition program 2023.
The significance of art and design as a reflection and driver of production circumstances and social change is central to the museum’s 2023 program. The Kunstmuseen Krefeld are taking advantage of the city’s 650th anniversary year to further explore their characteristic territory, combining reassessments of their own collection and history with issues and difficulties 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
Kunstmuseen Krefeld will conduct a large exhibition project highlighting modern artistic and design positions in the internationally renowned Lange and Esters Houses in 2023, the 650th anniversary year of the city’s founding. Artists and designers of all generations and fields who live in Krefeld and its environs or whose approaches have been impacted by spending a significant amount of time in the city will be invited. The show, which will include works in a variety of genres and mediums, will provide a comprehensive look at the city’s creative output. The show, titled Productive Spaces, explores current artistic activity in the city from a thematic standpoint. The exhibition investigates creative and design approaches to space from diverse viewpoints, whether the spaces in question are social, political, communicative, economic, or virtual, landscapes or spaces of mind. While Haus Lange will be dedicated to artists, Haus Esters will be dedicated to designers.
Curators: Katia Baudin, Magdalena Holzhey, Thomas Janzen, Sylvia Martin
Advisory Committee for the Design Field: Kerstin Plüm, Wienke Treblin, Tom Turowski
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Sarah Morris: All Systems Fail
October 15, 2023–March 10, 2024
The solo exhibition All Systems Fail by internationally acclaimed artist Sarah Morris (b. 1967, Sevenoaks, UK, based in New York) at Haus Lange and Haus Esters offers a survey of thirty years of her work, exploring the connections she forges between abstraction, architecture, modernism, art, and design. Sarah Morris has been developing a multifaceted body of work since the 1990s, including paintings, films, prints, and wall paintings that reflect her interest in networks, typologies, globalization, cities, and architecture. Her pieces are almost usually features of grids, structures, and cities, as well as moving, personal perspectives. Morris creates images that are both socially coded and emotionally communicative through the collision of truth and abstraction. Sarah Morris’ art investigates locations, images, and power dynamics, as well as its own position as influenced by external circumstances. In addition to foreign loans, the exhibition will contain artworks created specifically for Haus Lange Haus Esters, as well as an excursion to 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
The Kaiser Wilhelm Museum in Krefeld acquired an ensemble of several thousand works in 1923: the Deutsches Museum für Kunst in Handel und Gewerbe (German Museum of Art in Trade and Commerce), possibly the first design collection. It is still the focal point of the museum’s applied art collection to this day. It is a sample collection of outstanding design created between 1909 and 1919 with the backing of the Deutscher Werkbund by Hagen-based patron and collector Karl Ernst Osthaus. The Deutsches Museum’s goals were as ambitious as they were universal: to design the entirety of ordinary life in accordance with current aesthetic principles. While Osthaus’ art collections were transferred to Essen, his design holdings were transferred to Krefeld, where they perfectly match the Kaiser Wilhelm Museum’s museum idea, which is founded in the spirit of the reform movement. Beginning in November 2023, the Kunstmuseen Krefeld will commemorate the 100th anniversary of the purchase of this remarkable collection 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
The museum will also highlight the connection between local art and design and the international context in the coming year with new permanent collection rooms – Collection in Motion. New chambers for the collection will open on March 2, 2023. Recently donated works by Krefeld-based artists will interact with collection focal areas here. Collection in Motion is a permanent exhibition on the first floor of the Kaiser Wilhelm Museum that features chosen holdings. In total, 15 separate storylines are stitched 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 Friends of the Kunstmuseen Krefeld e.fortieth V.’s anniversary, the collection amassed through their dedication will be displayed in 2023. Every year, the Friends help Kunstmuseen Krefeld acquire essential pieces from exhibitions or with a close connection to the collections. Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke, Blinky Palermo, and Bruce Nauman coexist with prominent younger artists like Bethan Huws, Eva Kot’átková, and raumlaborberlin.
Director
Katia Baudin
Kunstmuseen Krefeld
Kaiser Wilhelm Museum
Joseph-Beuys-Platz 1
47798 Krefeld
Germany