Pattern Recognition. Revisiting the Municipal Collection Erlangen
*** Extended until March 12, 2023! ***
For over 50 years international contemporary art has been collected in Erlangen. With a focus on graphics, multiples, photography, and new media, the Municipal Art Collection encompasses a wide range of multiplied and serial art and today lists such important names as Joseph Beuys, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Nan Goldin, Keith Haring, Rebecca Horn, Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter, and Andy Warhol, among others. It documents formative trends in art of the postwar period and thus sees itself as a history of ideas in art after 1945.
Pattern Recognition. Revisiting the Municipal Collection Erlangen examines the rich collection fund against the backdrop of numerous upheavals in art and society since the collection's founding years. New technical processes, changes in political systems, globalization in general, but also a general change in the norms of seeing and exhibiting raise the question of where and when the contemporary merges into the historical. Aesthetic as well as thematic commonalities of the various works, in turn, also testify to the constants of artistic creation in the advancing 21st century.
By juxtaposing eleven long-standing works from the collection with eleven new acquisitions or loans by younger artists, the exhibition sets out to find patterns, similarities, and differences that underlie the diverse artistic strategies. The result is eleven intense dialogues that look back over five decades of art history and from which forward-looking narratives simultaneously emerge.
With works by:
Monira Al Qadiri, Athanasios Argianas, Thomas Bayrle, Anna & Bernhard Blume, Martin Disler, Aleksandra Domanović, Jack Goldstein, Eugen Gomringer, Keith Haring, John Hilliard, Sofia Hultén, Fritz Koenig, Simon Lehner, Lawrence Lek, Richard Long, Frida Orupabo, Alona Rodeh, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Nora Turato, Cy Twombly, Wolf Vostell, Sonja Yakovleva