Rebirth As An Art Museum
In the mid-1980s Berlin entrepreneur Erich Marx offered his private collection of contemporary art to the city . The Berlin Senate decided in 1987 to set up a Museum of Contemporary Art in the former railway station. The Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation agreed to integrate the museum as part of the National Gallery. A competition for the renovation of the station was announced by the Senate in 1989, and was won by architect Josef Paul Kleihues.
Between 1990 and 1996, Kleihues refurbished the building, and in November 1996, the museum was opened with an exhibition of works by Sigmar Polke. The Museum für Gegenwart exhibits modern and contemporary art. As part of the Marx collection, works by artists such as Joseph Beuys, Anselm Kiefer, Robert Rauschenberg, and Andy Warhol are on permanent display. An emphasis of the Nationalgalerie collection is art on video and film. A collection of 1970s video art, made as a gift by Mike Steiner, as well as the Joseph Beuys-Medienarchiv form its basis.
Between 2004 and 2010, the Museum für Gegenwart exhibited parts of the Friedrich Christian Flick Collection, whose main concentration is the late 20th century. Artists such as Paul McCarthy, Jason Rhoades, Rodney Graham, Peter Fischli and David Weiss, and Stan Douglas are represented in the collection by large format works, including elaborate installations as well as complex filmic spaces. Due to his Flick family background, the display, which had previously been rejected by the local authorities in Zurich, gave rise to protests in 2004.
Read more about this topic: Hamburger Bahnhof
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