Exhibition announcement 13.02.2025

An exhibition cooperation with the Albertina Modern Vienna

‘An artist took the first step towards a long-term connection between the Viehof Collection and the Albertina. When the family was offered the purchase of key works by the painter Georg Baselitz - 58 works on paper, supplemented by 7 large paintings - in 2007, we fulfilled his wish to combine this purchase with a permanent loan to the world's most important museum for art on paper, the Albertina in Vienna. Following an inaugural exhibition in Vienna, we were delighted that the Albertina actively loaned the Baselitz works to other museums. For the first major exhibition of the Viehof Collection in Hamburg, the Deichtorhallen showed a large part of these permanent loans in 2016.

In 2025, when Ralph Gleis took office as General Director of the Albertina, the opportunity arose for a long-term cooperation based on this connection. A joint exhibition was conceived for the start - works from the Viehof Collection in dialogue with works from the Albertina. The Viehof Collection is contributing around 70 paintings, sculptures and installations by a total of 19 artists from the Rhineland.’

Eugen Viehof, in: Foreword to the exhibition catalogue

Die Ausstellung "Remix - Von Gerhard Richter bis Katharina Grosse" wird in der Albertina Modern vom 11. April bis zum 07. September zu sehen sein.

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In 2008, the Viehof Collection was able to acquire a very special group of photographic works. These are the 101 C-prints from the Winterthur series by Thomas Struth. The Viehof Collection is the only art collection in the world to hold so many works from this series. The flower paintings and landscapes by Thomas Struth were created between 1991 and 1993. They were commissioned for patients rooms in a private clinic in Winterthur, Switzerland. The Viehof Collection is the only art collection in the world to include all 101 artworks from this series.

Sea of flowers and landscapes – nothing but nature as far as the eye can see. Ones first thought is that this is rather simple, trivial subject matter; after all, our culture today considers plant and flower motifs to be primarily decorative. The artworks are intended to be like windows, opening up the space and connecting patients‘ rooms to a living cosmos. They are not simply décor. In his flower pictures, created by photographing from close proximity, from different angles, and sometimes using overexposure or underexposure, Struth is not interested in portraying perfection. Instead, the theme of these photographs is a fantastic living diversity that – like the patients living in the rooms – are not in a state of stable equilibrium, but within the flow of time. Struth sometimes shows us closed buds, wilting flowers, crooked branches, or dried leaves. The flowers and landscapes are not intended simply to please the eye. Nor is this a schematic arrangement of botanical classifications. If it were, then the sole dandelion flower in Einzelner Löwenzahn – N°37, Düsseldorf, Neanderstraße 25 1993 would have to be seen as a representative of all existing dandelion flowers. On the contrary, Struth is concerned solely with this individual flower, with its peculiar characteristics. The flower is portrayed here heavily magnified, authentically, as a fragile individual. The concrete location in the title serves to emphasise this.

Text: Annika Forjahn, in: Freischwimmer - Fotografie der Sammlung Viehof und des Museum Kurhaus Kleve, 2020, S. 88-97

 

With one of its latest acquisitions, the Viehof Collection is adding photography to its list of artists. Since 2006, Düsseldorf-based artist Sebastian Riemer has repeatedly developed series that thematize, illuminate and question the documentary claim of photography. In his Press Paintings series, the artist deals with historical photos from press agencies that were mostly retouched with the help of paint in the analog age. The originals he selects in a lengthy search process are meticulously analyzed and individually edited. The intervention does not take place in the motif itself. Through the high-resolution enlargement, which leads to a shift in perception and detachment from the original context, coincidences are emphasized and new approaches are generated.

Riemer explains: "It is really importand to me to show the materiality and the signs of age of the prints very clearly so I use the photographic prozcess to make this visible by enlargement. But I also want to give back a kind of dignity to the photographed persons ans subject matters that hat been altered in so many ways. Some of them were altered cruelly on the pictorial level. So, I often choose a size that is very close to life-size of the depiction, emphasising the gap between the image content of the vintage prints and the partial new image content of the unintended parts (the retouching ans signs of ageing) Also the sometimes very arrucate miniature retouching looks "clumsier" in enlargement, suggesting the bold brush strokes form the field of fine art rather than the origin as applied craft. Moreover, I like to look at this process of stark entlargement like unearthing peudo frescos from an ancient time of image making. Size really makes the differences here."

Sebastian Riemer in conversation with David Campany, in: Sebastian Riemer, Press Paintings, p. 283

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