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The Museum Frieder Burda and the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden are celebrating the tenth anniversary of the Museum Frieder Burda, presenting highlights from the collection which has constantly grown for forty years. For Frieder Burda, sharing his works of art with others has been at the heart of his commitment from the very start. As was the case on the occasion of the museum opening in 2004, the exhibition will again present various groups of works from the extensive holdings of the collection at two venues — in the museum building designed by Richard Meier specifically for the collection as well as at the neo-classical Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden designed by Hermann Billing During one’s tour of the exhibition, one can trace both personal stages in the life of Frieder Burda from the past forty years as well as general developments and trends in 20th- and 21st-century painting and sculpture.

While works by German Expressionists such as Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and August Macke shaped Frieder Burda’s childhood and form the basis of his collection, an extended stay in America in the seventies generated his interest for the Abstract Expressionists Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Mark Rothko. His enthusiasm for American artists continued in subsequent years and intensified with his purchase of works by artists such as Andy Warhol, John Chamberlain, Robert Rauschenberg, William N. Copley, Malcolm Morley, Alex Katz, and Richard Estes.

Paintings from Pablo Picasso’s late oeuvre with their extraordinary power of expression reflect Frieder Burda’s affinity with France and will be shown in the exhibition as a selfcontained body of works. Works by Günther Uecker, Heinz Mack, Adolf Luther, and Christian Maggert, on the other hand, represent an important phase of postwar German art history. In 1958, the artists joined forces to establish the ZERO group, propagating an idealistic fresh start in art through their purist light-kinetic wall objects.

Extensive monographic groups of works by Gerhard Richter, Georg Baselitz, and Sigmar Polke from the 1960s to the present take on a unique role in the Collection Frieder Burda. Unlike ZERO, they stand for the enormous prominence of the picture and its continuity in German painting of the past fifty years. These are supplemented by outstanding paintings by Eugen Schönebeck, Anselm Kiefer, Markus Lüpertz, and Arnulf Rainer; by Neo Rauch, Herbert Brandl, Corinne Wasmuht, Karin Kneffel, as well as by other contemporary artists. The anniversary exhibition is being curated by Götz Adriani and Helmut Friedel.