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ABSTRACT
The history of founding GfZK – Museum of Contemporary Art in Leipzig reflects both immediate post-1989 euphoria and the conflicting interests and social fears of that time. In the summer of 1989, a group of West German art enthusiasts (patrons, collectors, and entrepreneurs) travelled to Leipzig to meet the East German art historian Klaus Werner. The latter put forth the idea of establishing a new museum in his town, which the West German colleagues accepted and a plan was set in motion. Still, without its own building, the GfZK organized remarkable exhibitions and projects in public spaces throughout the 1990s. At the same time, concerns evoked that the “imported” novel artistic positions would devalue local art production and that, through their money, the private patrons were gaining disproportionate influence to shape public taste and the concept of art. From today’s perspective, both assumptions can be debunked. Through its financing in a public–private partnership, GfZK has embodied a unique museum model in the eastern German states, and the model has proved to be exceptionally productive even beyond the founding years.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. In 1992, the Kulturkreis im BDI e. V. was renamed as the Kulturkreis der deutschen Wirtschaft im BDI e. V. For the sake of simplicity, the abbreviated form Kulturkreis is used in the text. See also: https://www.kulturkreis.eu/en/about/history/.
2. Initially, Werner was thinking primarily of artists born in East Germany who later emigrated to the FRG and became famous there, such as Georg Baselitz, A. R. Penck, Günther Uecker, Gotthard Graubner, and Gerhard Richter.
3. The Duisburg museum itself, established in 1958, benefited from the Museumsspende, a museum donation project of the Kulturkreis that enabled the museum to purchase art works for its collection.
4. In German, the word “Galerie” is mostly associated with a commercial art gallery. Even though GfZK does not pursue commercial activities, the word in its name causes misunderstandings from time to time. Klaus Werner proposed the name Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst in order to distinguish the new institution from traditional museums. He envisioned a vibrant place for contemporary art with a focus on artistic production and exhibition rather than collecting.
6. The informal name “Oetker Gallery” is a telling conflation of the new institution with the person of Dr. Arend Oetker.
7. Between 1991 and 1994 the office was located in Romanushaus, and between 1994 and 1997 in Sternwartenstraße.
8. The Monument to the Battle of the Nations (Völkerschlachtdenkmal) commemorates the 1813 Battle of Leipzig. Completed in 1913 for the 100th anniversary of the battle, in which Napoleon’s army was defeated.
The US-American artist Jenny Holzer created a laser projection on the monument from June 14 to 16, 1996, entitled “KriegsZustand” (State of War). Her texts from the earlier series “Lustmord” were leitmotifs. That series was known and controversially discussed in Germany, since it had already been printed in November 1993 as a reference to war crimes in Bosnia in the magazine of the “Süddeutsche Zeitung” with the admixture of donated blood of women.” Another medium for her messages were billboards on which commercial advertisements are normally displayed. Simultaneously with her project at the Leipzig monument, texts ran on public LED boards in Leipzig (Gorkistr./Tröndlinring) and Berlin (Kurfürstendamm) in successive single-line horizontal and vertical blocks.
9. The villa was expropriated by the Nazis in 1945 and later used by the University Hospital. In 1990, the Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy Music School moved in.
10. The Herfurth’sche Villa was to be used primarily for the museum’s offices, workshop, library, and storage. A second construction phase, with a new building designed by Peter Kulka, was intended for the exhibitions. For cost reasons, Kulka’s exhibition building was not realized. In 2004, the new GfZK building, designed by the Berlin and Vienna-based architecture studio AS-IF, was inaugurated.
11. The Ludwigs, famous for their varied collection strategy, including collections of US-American, Chinese, and Soviet art, started collecting art from the GDR as early as 1975. In their “Ludwig Institute for Art of the GDR,” established in 1983 in the West German city of Oberhausen, over 600 artworks were deposited until 2009. Apart from the Leipzig donation, another part of the collection, almost 500 graphic sheets, went to the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg.
12. The fears that GfZK’s establishment evoked can be tracked in a discussion between Georg Girardet, Herwig Guratsch, and Klaus Werner about the future of Leipzig’s museums, published in Leipzig’s monthly programme magazine Kreuzer („Da entsteht Konkurrenz“May 1995).
13. These exhibitions include Up Till Now – Reconsidering historical performances and action art from the GDR (2013, curated by Anna Jehle and Julia Kurz); Freundschaftsantiqua – Foreign students at the Leipzig Academy of Visual Arts: An international chapter of art in the GDR (2014, curated by Julia Blume and Heidi Stecker); and Bewußtes Unvermögen: Das Archiv Gabriele Stötzer (2019–2020, curated by Dr. Vera Lauf).
14. For example, in the progressively published multivolume collection catalogue Stecker, Heidi; Steiner, Barbara (eds.): Sammeln. Leipzig, 2007–2012. Further in the collection are the presentations Bilderspende (2006, curated by Heidi Stecker and Barbara Steiner), Deutsche Geschichten (2007, curated by Heidi Stecker and Barbara Steiner), and Restitution of a Missing Past? (2012, curated by Heidi Stecker and Franciska Zólyom).
15. The multi-part exhibition series Cultural Territories (2003–2004) negotiated intercultural phenomena and argued against the notion of homogeneous, self-contained nation-states and the misleading notion of the “Eastern Bloc.” Heimat Moderne (2005) revisited the architectural heritage of modernism in Leipzig.
16. Dorit Margreiter (A) illuminated and filmed the neon sign on the roof of the abandoned shopping centre. She thus “re-activated” the logo and created a lasting homage to a cultic typeface from the 1960s. On the 100th anniversary of the Leipzig monument, Alexandra Pirici (RO) invited volunteers to experience exhaustion and weakness while being seated in the lap of the gigantic sculptures in the hall of fame inside the monument, depicting German people’s virtues. Due to the anniversary, more than 10.000 visitors attended the performance and gained a new perspective on the personification of virtues.
17. Since the founding of the GfZK, Dr. Arend Oetker has provided the share of the Förderkreis. Since 2020, the funds have been disbursed via the Brigitte and Arend Oetker Foundation.
18. Together with Barbara Steiner, these were Andreja Hribernik, Ilina Koralova, Julia Schäfer, and Heidi Stecker.
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Franciska Zólyom
Franciska Zólyom has been director of GfZK – Museum of Contemporary Art Leipzig since 2012. Formerly, she worked as curator at the Ludwig Museum of Contemporary Art in Budapest and was director of the Institute of Contemporary Art – Dunaújváros, Hungary from 2006 to 2009. Currently she is also member of the University Council of the Bauhaus University Weimar and of the Cultural Senate of Saxony.