BADEN-BADEN.- More than six years after the inauguration of the Museum Frieder Burda, its founder provides a very personal insight into his collection. On the occasion of his seventy-fifth birthday, Frieder Burda selects the exhibits from his meanwhile some one thousand works of art. About 80 works will be on view from March 18 to May 15, 2011, and stand for specific focuses and phases in the assembly of the private collection. Entitled Lebenslinien – Stationen einer Sammlung / Lifelines – Stations of a Collection, the exhibition includes sculptures, objects, and, in particular, paintings. Starting with the brightly colored paintings of German Expressionism, which left a marked impression on Frieder Burda in his childhood home, over the course of the years he has assembled a distinguished collection of art of the 20th and 21st century. It primarily focuses on American Abstract Expressionism, Pablo Picasso’s late work, and finally German painting with important groups of works by Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke, Georg Baselitz, as well as Arnulf Rainer.

Since the 1990s, these have been supplemented by art by young contemporary artists, some of whom are just beginning their careers, but also by acclaimed painters, such as Neo Rauch, or photographers, such as Axel Hütte and Gregory Crewdson.

Fascinated by Color
The focus of the collector’s interest in art lies in his fascination with color and the expressive, emotional qualities of painting. Thus, a collection of personal caliber has developed that unites pioneering stances in painting of the modern era and is characterized by the distinct element of color: “I grew up with color. My father collected the German Expressionists,” Frieder Burda reminisces. The first painting he bought, in 1968, was a slit canvas by Lucio Fontana, also a form of rebellion against his parental home: “I wanted to show how modern I am.”

Passion for Collecting
Selected paintings also point toward other of Frieder Burda’s lifelines: frequent sojourns in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s aroused his interest in American Abstract Expressionism and led to his later acquiring No. 36 (Black Stripe) by Mark Rothko, as well as paintings by De Kooning, Clyfford Still, and Jackson Pollock. The collector’s penchant for France is demonstrated not lastly by several paintings done by Picasso late in his life in Mougins in southern France, where Frieder Burda also often sojourns.

The emphasis in the lower gallery is on sculptures. These include Henri Laurens’ bronze sculpture La mère as well as works by John Chamberlain and Georg Baselitz. Kisten Walhalla, which consists of boxes containing death masks, presents object art by Arnulf Rainer on the mezzanine level.

Gerhard Richter’s painting Kerze is also being shown again, for it thoroughly fascinates Frieder Burda. “It is a painting with a high degree of meditative radiance and never ceases to enthrall me. Without enthusiasm and passion there are no good paintings and peak athletic performance, no good musicians such as Anne Sophie Mutter, no Nobel prizes for research. And neither does an art collection grow without the enthusiasm and passion of the collector.” Art by young German artists comprises the collection’s as yet final station.