MUNICH.- On 1 November 2013, the Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen will be welcoming Achim Hochdörfer (45) to his new post as both Director of the Brandhorst Collection and Chairperson of the Udo and Anette Brandhorst Foundation. After leading the Museum Brandhorst for nearly six years, Armin Zweite is leaving the museum to devote himself to other challenges.

During his studies, in 1997, Achim Hochdörfer spent several months with Cy Twombly at his studios in Rome and Gaeta , where he helped compile the catalogue raisonné of the artist’s sculptural works. After working as a curatorial assistant at mumok in Vienna from 1998 to 2001, he took up a permanent position there in early 2002 as a curator, becoming head of performance art and art theory. Parallel to this, Hochdörfer accepted a teaching role at both the Institute of Art History at the University of Vienna and the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts.

Hochdörfer already has several plans for the Museum Brandhorst, including a painting exhibition with the working title: ‘Painting 2.0, Expression in the Information Age’, in a curatorial collaboration with David Joselit, Carnegie Professor of the History of Modern Art and Culture at Yale University.

The Museum Brandhorst was opened in 2009 in the immediate vicinity of the Pinakothek museums and complements with its impressive collection of modern and contemporary art the Kunstareal Munich. The collections of the Pinakothek der Moderne and the Museum Brandhorst together form a complementary and richly faceted array and allow for a lively encounter with various artistic positions of the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries.

The striking building stands out thanks to its façade cladding comprising 36,000 ceramic rods in 23 different colours. It has become a real eye-catcher in the lively Maxvorstadt district that is characterised by museums, university buildings and
galleries.

The Brandhorst Collection
From the 1970s onwards, Udo Brandhorst and his wife Anette (d. 1999) collected more than 1000 works by seminal 20th and 21st-century artists. These were largely paintings, drawings and sculptures, later followed by photographs, multimedia works and installations.

While the focus was initially placed on classical avant-garde artists (Kazimir Malevich, Kurt Schwitters, Pablo Picasso) and post-war European Modernists (Joseph Beuys, Palermo, Sigmar Polke, Jannis Kounellis, Mario Merz), over the years their interest turned increasingly to American art – with John Chamberlain, Robert Gober, Dan Flavin, Bruce Nauman, Richard Tuttle, Walter De Maria and others represented by important individual works or groups of works.

With many more than 100 exhibits by Andy Warhol (1928–1987), virtually no other European collection has comparable holdings of works by the best-known of all Pop artists.

The nucleus of more than 170 works by the American artist Cy Twombly (1928–2011) is unique anywhere in the world. Works by Damien Hirst, Mike Kelley and Robert Gober as well as by multimedia artists such as Isaac Julien, Anri Sala, Stan Douglas and David Claerbout testify to how contemporary art increasingly attracted the collectors’ attention as well.

While the Pinakothek der Moderne provides visitors with a general picture of developments in 20th and 21st-century art, the Museum Brandhorst focuses on a more in-depth exploration of individual artists’ works.