Kunstmuseum Bonn – författare

Over the past 20 years the KiCo Collection has become one of the most important collections of contemporary art. Having started with Colour Painting, today it includes the entire spectrum of picture-related contemporary art, from panel paintings to installations. The catalogue shows central blocks of works from the collection, including masterpieces by Marcia Hafif, Maria Lassnig, Katharina Grosse, Wolfgang Tillmans and Olafur Eliasson.The KiCo Collection has been growing continuously since the 1990s. It originally directed its focus towards Colour Painting but later moved beyond the limitations set by the picture and also integrated expansive installations into the collection. The spectrum ranges from Eliasson’s light installations to Tillman’s photographic investigations which link visual found objects with a systematic media reflexion. It is precisely these forms of boundary crossing which make the KiCo Collection so topical. It shows impressively that the arts no longer allow us to confine them to the ghetto of individual genres, but that they draw their strength from interconnections and fusions of content and media.

Gerhard Richter (*1932) is an exceptional personality – not because his pictures are world famous, but because he has demonstrated a new approach to painting. His art masterfully moves between abstraction and representation, sensuousness and denial – ambiv alent attitudes which he demonstrated even in his early work. Gerhard Richter’s oeuvre overcomes the division between abstract and representational art. His pictures neither cultivate a modest interplay of colours and forms nor do they deliver an intact p icture of reality. Richter is a sceptical artist who questions the reality of his art even when the prime subject of his paintings is the tangible. This applies in particular to his door, curtain and window pictures of the 1960s, which form the central foc us of this volume. They stage a playful examination of the illusory nature of art, which always questions what painting shows or conceals. This lavishly appointed volume is published to mark the artist’s 85th birthday.