Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof Museum Receives Major Donation

The Hamburger Bahnhof Contemporary Art Museum in Berlin in 2007. Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images.

Friedrich Christian Flick, the German-Swiss collector and heir to the Flick industrial fortune, has donated 104 artworks to Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof Museum for Contemporary Art in celebration of his 70th birthday. It is the second time he has made a large-scale donation, having previously given the museum 166 artworks in 2008.

The gift was announced in a statement by the President of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, Hermann Parzinger who said, “The fact that Friedrich Christian Flick has once again donated over 100 works from the 20th and 21st centuries is quite extraordinary and represents the long-standing and successful cooperation between the collector and the museum.”

The director of the Nationalgalerie, Udo Kittelmann emphasized that the donation was proof that despite the museum’s relative lack of resources, “a focused collecting effort” could still be “realized successfully.”

Michael Eissenhauer, the General Director of State Museums added that the artworks were an “important gesture at the right time.”

The gift includes works from around 50 internationally recognized artists, including Sutter’s Mill (2000) an aluminum and plastic installation by Jason Rhodes, Massekoje With Four Figures (1985) by Katharina Fritsch, and Wall, Residential and Wax Plant (1997–98) by Manfred Pernice.

The donated works also include important examples of video and photography such as a 35mm film by Rodney Graham from 2003, a clay-animation by Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg from 2004, the popular video installation The Best Animals Are the Flat Animals (1998) by Diana Thater, and color photography by Thomas Struth and Cindy Sherman.

The donated works are scheduled to be shown in a special exhibition at the Hamburger Bahnhof in fall 2015.

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