MUSEUM BRANDHORST

Description

Essentials about the Museum Brandhorst in brief

Lovers of contemporary art should definitely have seen the Museum Brandhorst during a visit to Munich. Opened in 2009, the museum is one of the latest additions to Munich’s museum landscape. The Museum Brandhorst is part of the Kunstareal in Munich’s Maxvorstadt district and presents the collection of the Brandhorst couple, which consists of over 700 works by famous contemporary artists such as Joseph Beuys, Damien Hirst, Bruce Nauman, Andy Warhol and, above all, Cy Twombly.

The history of the Museum Brandhorst

The Brandhorst Collection can be traced back to the longstanding collecting passion of the married couple Anette and Udo Brandhorst. They began collecting works of Classical Modernism in the 1970s and in subsequent decades acquired works by prominent German artists such as Georg Baselitz, Joseph Beuys, and Gerhard Richter. In the 1990s, the couple began to selectively focus their collection. The center of the collection became American contemporary art from the 1960s to the 1990s, including works by artists Cy Twombly and Andy Warhol.

Around the year 2000, after the death of Anette Brandhorst, Udo Brandhorst began looking for partners to found a museum. He set the condition that the collection had to be shown as an independent museum and looked for a city or a federal state to finance the construction. The Free State of Bavaria finally agreed to build the museum on Brandhorst’s terms. Since then, the museum has also come under public criticism. Many critics claimed that the Brandhorst Collection would not have the necessary significance to justify the construction of a stand-alone museum. Moreover, the works would also have been a good addition to the directly neighboring Pinakothek der Moderne.

The architecture of the Museum Brandhorst

Be that as it may, the new museum building with its facade designed in 23 different colors has definitely become a real eye-catcher. It consists of 36,000 square, vertically mounted ceramic rods that create different visual impressions depending on the angle and distance of the viewer. The museum building was erected on the site of the former Türkenkaserne according to plans by the architectural firm Sauerbruch Hutton. Three floors and several mezzanines provide 3,200 square meters of exhibition space and 5,300 square meters of usable space.

The collection of the Museum Brandhorst

The exhibition focus of the Brandhorst Museum is the works of the U.S. painter, photographer and object artist Cy Twombly, who is one of the most important representatives of abstract expressionism. An entire floor of the building is dedicated to Twombly’s works, including Lepanto, 12 paintings created in 2001 for the Venice Biennale. In total, the collection contains over 200 works, the largest collection of Twombly in Europe, including paintings, sculptures, graphics and photographs. In addition to Twombly, the world-famous Andy Warhol is also very prominently represented in the Brandhorst Museum with over 100 works.