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Returns to Berlin after many years in the USA: Klaus Biesenbach
Photo:
Jared Siskin / Getty Images
From January 1, 2022, the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin will have a new director: Klaus Biesenbach will take over the building.
This was announced by the Board of Trustees of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation.
Minister of State for Culture Grütters said of the decision: "With his openness to the new and the unexpected, Klaus Biesenbach will be a great asset to the Berlin museum landscape." At the end of 2020, at his own request, it had not been extended.
Klaus Biesenbach worked in the USA for the past few decades.
First he worked for the Museum of Modern Art in New York, in the role of chief curator and director of the contemporary experimental department MoMA PS 1. He organized exhibitions with Marina Abramović and Kraftwerk in New York, among others.
Since 2018, Biesenbach has been director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, where he introduced free entry and still managed the house through the Corona crisis without a deficit.
Now he is returning to Berlin, where his career began in the 1990s.
In 1996 he brought the first Berlin Biennale with him.
He is considered to be one of the heads of an era that reinvented the art city of Berlin after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Back in Berlin, Biesenbach wants to reach a large audience with the Neue Nationalgalerie: create access, establish connections, break down barriers.
He himself says of his new job: “Berlin is building a museum of the 20th century, linked to one of the most beautiful art spaces that exist internationally, the New National Gallery by Mies van der Rohe.
This is a historic opportunity, challenge and responsibility to illuminate the unique Berlin collections of the 20th century with a contemporary, experimental perspective and to make them accessible to the general public. "
Reopening after five years of renovation
The Neue Nationalgalerie had been refurbished for five years at a cost of around 140 million euros.
The reopening took place at the end of August.
Biesenbach is also to become head of the Museum of the 20th Century, which is being built next to it. The Hamburger Bahnhof - Museum für Gegenwart is taking over the curatorial duo Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath, as the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation also announced.
