MUNICH.- The Kunstverein Munich announced the appointment of a new director. After having received many interesting applications in a highly competitive process, the Board has selected the American-born curator Chris Fitzpatrick for the position. He will begin on the 1st of January 2015, and will succeed Bart van der Heide.

For the past five years, Bart van der Heide has directed the Kunstverein Munich to great acclaim. His work and dedication have helped develop the Kunstverein on both the content and structural levels. Interdisciplinarity and an international focus have been key to Bart van der Heide's program, which notably included solo exhibitions by artists such as Simon Denny, Cathy Wilkes, Tobias Madison, Keren Cytter, Richard Tuttle, and most recently, Ger van Elk, as well as internationally- and art-historically-relevant group exhibitions, such as La Voix Humaine, Group Affinity, and The Imaginary Museum. Bart van der Heide will end his program with a solo exhibition by the artist James Richards, opening in January 2015.

Chris Fitzpatrick (born 1978 in New York) has been the director of the not-for-profit contemporary art centre Objectif Exhibitions in Antwerp, Belgium, since 2012. After receiving an MA from California College of the Arts in 2009, he gained recognition for developing unconventional exhibition formats, often experimenting with the temporality of exhibitions. He has lent his artist-centric curatorial approach to exhibitions with Nina Beier, Bruce Conner, Mark Dion, Paul Elliman, Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys, Joao Maria Gusmao & Pedro Paiva, Angie Keefer, Rosalind Nashashibi, Iza Tarasewicz, and many others. His writing and interviews have been published in Spike Art Quarterly, Pazmaker, Nero, Mousse, L’Uomo Vogue, Fillip, The Federal, Cura, The Baltic Notebooks of Anthony Blunt, Art Papers, as well as in numerous catalogs and books.

Chris Fitzpatrick will launch his program at the Kunstverein Munich in April 2015.