Norddeutsche Landesbank - Art Collection

Art Collection

In 1985 Nord/LB started to build up an art collection with the aim of representing post-1945 modern art in an international context. The collection today comprises about 3,000 artworks, still with an emphasis on postwar art, including Georg Baselitz, Joseph Beuys, Gerhard Richter, Sol LeWitt, Jeff Koons, Jannis Kounellis and Jörg Immendorff, among others. Employees can use the works to decorate the buildings, and they are displayed within the bank's own exhibition program. In 1999 it was able to open the exhibition space of its own.

In 2009, Nord/LB returned Franz Marc's Cat Behind a Tree (1910), a painting the bank had bought in 1983, to the descendant of a Jewish shoe-manufacturing family persecuted by the Nazis; the bank had loaned the painting long-term to the Sprengel Museum in Hanover. In 2012, the bank sold its Jeff Koons sculpture, Tulips (1995-2004), from the “Celebration” series. The bank will use the proceeds to set up a foundation to promote contemporary art and cultural projects in northern Germany.