Rhenish Art Autumn

Florian Peters-Messer Florian Peters-Messer has been collecting art for thirty years. The property entrepreneur from Viersen initially began with a classical approach with works by Stephan Balkenhol and Gerhard Richter, before his encounter with the Paris-based Swiss installation and multimedia artist Thomas Hirschhorn at the end of the 1990s triggered a radical focussing of his view of contemporary art. Hirschhorn, who aims to intervene in public discourse with his works and offer alternative models for thought and action, became a model for further acquisitions in the collection. To put it bluntly, they are all united by a political impetus, the critical accompaniment of social upheaval, whereby the realisation - sometimes direct, sometimes expressive, sometimes conceptual - is astonishingly diverse. In addition to expansive installations, the collection includes paintings, drawings, photography and video art by big names in contemporary art such as Kader Attia, Jon Bock, Monica Bonvicini and Sophie Calle, as well as works by a younger generation of artists, exemplified by Henrike Naumann, Murat Önen and Sophia Süßmilch.

To mark his 60th birthday this year, Florian Peters-Messer has made a substantial donation to the Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf. He has been closely associated with the museum for years through his work in the Freundeskreis, and in 2020 he curated the exhibition ‘Empört euch! Art in times of anger’. From 29 August, parts of this donation will be shown for the first time under the title ‘Too much future. Donation Florian Peters-Messer’ will be shown for the first time at the Kunstpalast from 29 August, followed by a performance by Sophia Süßmilch the next day.

Parallel to this, 130 works from all of Gerhard Richter's creative phases will be shown in a major survey exhibition at the Kunstpalast from 5 September. These are often ‘hidden treasures’ (the title of the exhibition) - works from private collections in the Rhineland that have rarely or never been on public display before. They thus also tell a part of the history of collecting around the young gallery scene that had formed in Düsseldorf and Cologne in the 1960s and from whose curiosity and openness the artist, who had moved from Dresden shortly before the Wall was built, benefited greatly.

There is hardly a more suitable time to find out in compact form what this gallery scene looks like today and which young artists might one day follow in Richter's footsteps than the DC Open, the now traditional start to the autumn season for galleries in the Rhineland. Once again, around 50 participants - from established big names to lively off-spaces - will be opening their new shows on the weekend of 1 to 3 September. Galerie Falko Alexander, for example, is showing digitally created works by artist and musician Tim Berresheim, which deal with the effects of digital technologies on the entirety of our living environment. At Martin Kudlek, Cologne-based paper and space virtuoso Simon Schubert unfolds further excerpts from his imaginary-surreal parallel world of distorted or optically expanded spaces. Karsten Greve presents the abstract American painter Kathleen Jacobs for the first time in Germany, and Galerie Buchholz announces a new work by Isa Genzken under the mysterious title ‘4 Towers, 3 Stelae, Actors and Full Moon’.

Just one month later, the Kölnischer Kunstverein is coming up with a real scoop. ‘A journey into the incredible life of Udo Kier’ promises the exhibition “Udo is love”, which opens on 27 September and focuses on the many connections between the German Hollywood actor Udo Kier and art. Kier, who also appeared in front of the camera for Fassbinder and Schlingensief and whose impressive physiognomy is hard to resist, lived in Cologne until the early 1990s, together with the painter Michael Buthe and the video artist Marcel Odenbach, among others, in the artists' colony.

From 12 October, the exhibition ‘Fluxus and beyond: Ursula Burghardt, Benjamin Petterson’ at the Museum Ludwig promises a new discovery of two (unjustly) little-known artists of the Fluxus movement. The Jewish artist Ursula Burghardt, who fled from the Nazis and then returned to Germany, and the African-American musician and artist Benjamin Petterson met in Cologne in 1960, giving curator Barbara Engelbach the opportunity to explore their works and diverse artistic collaborations in more detail. Not only the happenings, concerts and performances of the Fluxus period play a role, but also the ruptures in their respective biographies, which were characterised by experiences of exclusion.