TILBURG.- In the presentation of De Pont's collection this summer, special consideration is being given to recent acquisitions, many of which will be shown for the first time. Among the newcomers to the collection is Fiona Banner (Merseyside, UK 1966). Banner’s practice encompasses sculpture, drawing, installation, bookmaking and performance. She has often returned to language. For the last few years Banner has been creating neon pieces dealing with the alphabet and punctuation in a pictorial way. Using neon tubes has led the artist to think about glass, its possibilities and limits. The work of hers acquired by De Pont, titled Work I (2013), is the form of a scaffold on wheels, carried out in glass on a one-to-one scale. When describing this work she states, “I spend a lot of time up scaffold towers during the making of large wall drawings, so the experience of being high up on a scaffold is intimately associated with process, the tension between the idea of the work and the completion of the work; between something not existing and existing, it’s a kind of fantasy space, it is a precarious moment. When the scaffold is gone I always miss it”. Work 1 echoes the lean yet unintentional aesthetics of this structure, which combines maximum strength, with maximum temporality. Similarly the reality of art itself is often temporary - it is put up, installed, then stored or erased. Some of the other recent acquisitions and old acquaintances on show this summer: watercolors by Callum Innes, drawings by David Claerbout, ceramic sculptures by Guido Geelen, Tacita Dean's film Gellért, Rita McBride's Curves and -last but not least- Straßenbild, a monumental work made up of eighteen paintings, by Georg Baselitz. This work, by one of the world's leading artists, is on loan from the Kunstmuseum Bonn for the period of a year.

'They're waving, shouting and hanging, sometimes falling out the window. The background is mostly dark; you can't see what's behind the figures. These are women at windows, each isolated from her environment and not communicating with the others.' This is how the German artist Georg Baselitz (1938) described his Straßenbild, a monumental work made up of eighteen paintings, which he finished in 1980. A year later the series was exhibited at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and in 1989 the work was acquired by the new Kunstmuseum Bonn. That was the same year in which De Pont was founded, and the purchase of this work was also discussed here at that time. Now, twenty-five years later, Straßenbild is coming to Tilburg as part of a temporary exchange between the collections of the Kunstmuseum and De Pont. In return De Pont will be sending two Große Geister, by Thomas Schütte, to Bonn for one year. Although this is certainly a sacrifice – as will be the lack of access to Richard Serra's Gutter Splash Two Corner Cast, which needs to be hidden behind one of the walls on which Straßenbild will be shown – we will indeed have the chance to become acquainted with another masterpiece from the twentieth century.