KARLSRUHE.- The Landesbank Baden-Württemberg (LBBW) has been a partner of the ZKM | Karlsruhe for many years. As an expansion of this partnership, the Collection Landesbank Baden-Württemberg has, additionally, collaborated with the ZKM | Museum of Contemporary Art since 2005. In the context of this cooperation, the collection will be honored in 2009 with a major exhibition on the ground floor of the museum.

For decades, the LBBW has maintained an extensive art collection. Although well into the 1980s, the collection’s main focus was primarily on exceptional examples of southwest German art, over the course of its further development, the spectrum expanded notably. Works by outstanding post-1945 German artists hereby joined the collection. Beginning in the 1990s, built up parallel to this were areas dedicated to national and international contemporary art. With the collection’s current focus, embraced by the motto “Collecting Contemporary,” the Landesbank Baden-Württemberg is dedicated exclusively to internationally renowned contemporary German art. In recent years, in the course of the collection’s cooperation with the ZKM | Museum of Contemporary Art, individual signet works from the LBBW collection have already been publicly presented together with works from the collections of ZKM | Museum of Contemporary Art’s private partners in exhibitions such as “Light Art from Artificial Light,” “Faster! Bigger! Better!”, “Clio. A short history of art in Euramerica,” “Vertrautes Terrain – Contemporary Art in/about Germany,” and “Vertrautes Terrain – Collectors’ Choice.”

Major sections of the Collection Landesbank Baden-Württemberg are being made available to the public in a museum show for the first time since the last, large-scale presentation “Zoom” ten years ago. Although the collection’s focus is on contemporary German art since the early 1980s, the exhibition will show primarily the latest developments against this backdrop. In this, special consideration is given to continually expanding or, in part, also entirely newly acquired work groups from seminal contemporary artists rather than to outstanding individual acquisitions. For this reason, the exhibition does not make the claim of offering a representative overview of the holdings, but rather, allows a closer look at the collection’s more recent history.

Positions of meanwhile internationally renowned artists such as Franz Ackermann, Thomas Demand, Günther Förg, Christian Jankowski, Martin Kippenberger, Michel Majerus, Albert Oehlen, Tobias Rehberger, and Wolfgang Tillmans, from whom the first works arrived in the collection in the mid-1990s, meanwhile form superb focuses within the collection’s broad spectrum. The work groups by Werner Büttner, Thomas Grünfeld, Thomas Locker, Ina Weber, and Peter Zimmerman were likewise expanded with important works, whereas works by George Herold were added at the end of the 1990s. Newly entered are also younger artists, such as André Butzer, Josephine Meckseper, Julika Rudelius, and Corinne Wasmuht with their works, that expand the collection with new power fields and enrich it with additional content and contexts.

With more than 250 works from nineteen artists, the exhibition “Extended” also links, in part, onto themes and issues found in the ZKM | Museum of Contemporary Art’s exhibition Vertrautes Terrain – Contemporary Art in/about Germany (2008/2009) and especially its extension Collectors’ Choice in interaction with the Boros and Grässlin collections. At the same time, “Extended” creates a hinge of sorts in the ZKM exhibition calendar, and a preview for when the ZKM | Museum of Contemporary Art, on the occasion of its tenth anniversary, is entirely dedicated to the collectors and cooperating collections with the presentation collected @ beginning December 2009.
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