2016 - News - Detail Page - Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz

The Director of the Nationalgalerie of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Udo Kittelmann, will not be extending his contract, which runs until 31 October 2020, at his own request. The 61-year-old will have spent twelve years at the helm of the collection, which comprises five museums - in addition to the Alte and Neue Nationalgalerie, the Museum Berggruen and the Scharf-Gerstenberg Collection, the Hamburger Bahnhof - Museum für Gegenwart - Berlin is also part of the Nationalgalerie's cosmos.

The former director of the Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt am Main took up his post in Berlin on 1 November 2008, succeeding Peter-Klaus Schuster. He turned the Nationalgalerie into a magnetic place for all social groups. From the very beginning, he succeeded in igniting a veritable firework display of exhibitions, events and extraordinary happenings in an extremely creative, curious, self-confident and self-critical manner. He was supported by a network of outstanding curators, whom he was able to win over for his projects. Udo Kittelmann reopened the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin to contemporary art. He never catered to the mainstream with his programme - especially at the Hamburger Bahnhof - but instead focused on unconventional, strong positions alongside large-scale solo or themed exhibitions. And not infrequently on discoveries. Social relevance and critical intervention were always more important to him than quick successes with easy, crowd-pleasing concepts. The fact that he was nevertheless able to attract a large and, above all, young, international audience to the Nationalgalerie with this programme is one of his great achievements.

It is also to Udo Kittelmann's credit that Berlin's Nationalgalerie is today mentioned in the same breath as the world's most important art museums and has thus gained additional national and international relevance. The extensive programme of exhibitions and events was largely made possible by remarkably successful third-party fundraising, for which Udo Kittelmann was always passionately committed and correspondingly successful. In 2013, he was honoured as "European Cultural Manager of the Year".

His main concern was and is to develop long-term and sustainable perspectives for the Nationalgalerie and, above all, to constantly confront the magnificent collection with new questions. Already with his first exhibition "Die Kunst ist super!" (2009/2010), Udo Kittelmann scrutinised the Nationalgalerie's collection against the backdrop of supposedly stable value systems and established art as a seismograph of social change. This was followed by major contemporary overview exhibitions: "Modern Times. The Collection. 1900-1945" (2010/2011) and "Divided Heaven. The Collection. 1945-1968" (2011/2013) at the Neue Nationalgalerie, "The Black Years. Stories of a Collection. 1933 - 1945" (2015/2016) and most recently "Hello World. Revision of a Collection" at the Hamburger Bahnhof, which posed the question of what the Nationalgalerie's collection would look like if it had not been acquired with a Eurocentric view. The list of exhibitions curated by Udo Kittelmann and his team is long, very long, and cannot be reproduced in full here.
In addition to solo exhibitions of well-known names such as Thomas Demand (2009/2010), Rudolf Stingel (2010), Carsten Höller (2010/2011), Tomás Saraceno (2011/2012), Gerhard Richter (2012), Martin Kippenberger (2013) and Otto Piene (2014), lesser-known historical and contemporary positions were also always represented, which only received the national and international attention they deserved thanks to Kittelmann's commitment - just to mention Taryn Simon (2011/2012), Hilma af Klint (2013), Gottfried Lindauer's Māori Portraits (2014/2015), Adrian Piper (2017) and currently Jack Whitten. The exhibition "Emil Nolde - A German Legend. The Artist in National Socialism" at the Hamburger Bahnhof is currently attracting international attention. From October this year, the exhibition "Struggle for Visibility" in the Alte Nationalgalerie will present exclusively pre-1919 artists from the Nationalgalerie for the first time.

In the almost twelve years of his directorship, over 500 high-quality works from all eras from the 19th century to contemporary art have been exhibited in the Alte Nationalgalerie. Examples of many other works include Leo von Klenze's "Concordia-Tempel" (1857), Lotte Laserstein's "Abend über Potsdam" (1930), Pierre Huyghe's "Zoodram 6" (2013) and Adrian Piper's "The Probable Trust Registry" (2013-2015) as well as Max Beckmann's "Selbstbildnis in Bar" (1942). The collections of Erich Marx, Ulla and Heiner Pietzsch, Friedrich Christian Flick and Egidio Marzona have also attracted a great deal of attention in recent years thanks to Udo Kittelmann's efforts.

Numerous strategically important decisions in the history of the Nationalgalerie were made during Udo Kittelmann's time in office. Following the closure of the Neue Nationalgalerie for refurbishment in spring 2015, a new temporary home for classical modern art was established in the form of the Neue Galerie at Hamburger Bahnhof. Large parts of the Nationalgalerie's collection have also been on display abroad and in other German cities. Udo Kittelmann is currently responsible for planning the new Nationalgalerie building at the Kulturforum - the ground-breaking ceremony is scheduled for October/November 2019.

The President of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, Hermann Parzinger, calls Udo Kittelmann a "great museum man with his very own attitude": "My thanks to Udo Kittelmann are extensive; he has done an enormously committed job for the Nationalgalerie and thus also for the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin as a whole in his twelve years as director. His work has a degree of sustainability that will endure beyond the day of his departure. Udo Kittelmann has made the Nationalgalerie a global player both nationally and internationally, for which I am personally deeply indebted to him. His extraordinary curatorial skills, his passion for art and his unerring instinct for interesting positions will certainly continue to amaze us in other places."

Michael Eissenhauer, Director General of the National Museums in Berlin: "Udo Kittelmann and his accomplished, passionate work will be missed. With his keen instinct for cultural and social trends, Udo Kittelmann has always managed to identify important themes at an early stage, break open the art canon and trigger social debates. With his vision of a museum that always places people at the centre, he continually provides impulses for the international art and museum discourse - impulses that other institutions internationally take their cue from. Personally and on behalf of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, I would like to thank Udo Kittelmann for the consistently excellent and fruitful years of collaboration."

At his own request, Udo Kittelmann will not be extending his contract, which runs until 31 October 2020. His current deputy Joachim Jäger will take over as acting director of the Nationalgalerie after his departure and until the position is filled.