Ludwig Forum Aachen
In the location's words:
The first presentation of the young American Pop Art scene in Aachen in 1968 by Peter and Irene Ludwig was a real sensation. It led to the founding of the Neue Galerie - Sammlung Ludwig, headed by Wolfgang Becker. The program of the Neue Galerie and the later Ludwig Forum for International Art was directly linked to the often bold developmental steps of the Ludwig Collection. Thanks to the collector's enthusiasm for the "direct expression of a generational attitude to life", works by Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Duane Hanson and Chuck Close, among others, which later became world-famous, found their place in the collection.
At the end of the 1970s, the collector and museum turned their attention to Eastern European cultural regions. The unrest caused by the fundamental social and political changes was reflected in an unusually intense artistic creativity that was worth observing. Time and again, art from "West" and "East" was confronted and combined. Works by Baselitz and Ebersbach were juxtaposed with each other, socialist realism and Neue Wilde, just as works from Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania and the USSR were juxtaposed with works from West Germany, France and Italy. The founding of the Ludwig Museums in Oberhausen, Koblenz and Vienna as well as in Budapest and St. Petersburg was intended to guarantee lasting cooperation with the respective countries. In Aachen, the enormously expanded collection found new premises in the Ludwig Forum for International Art, which opened in 1991.
The view was now clear for a global view of art. Initial negotiations on the acquisition of Cuban art in the early 1990s led to extensive presentations of Cuban and Latin American art. The newly founded Ludwig Foundation in Havana was an important partner in this process. In 1996 - with the founding of another Ludwig Museum in Beijing - the basis was created for an ongoing exchange with China. The Ludwig Forum Aachen responded with a series of exhibitions featuring artists from China, Taiwan, Korea, Japan and Indonesia. This was complemented by the presentation of new acquisitions from China, which thus found a permanent place in the collection.
Today, the collection and the potential of the Ludwig Forum Aachen present themselves as a kaleidoscope of a world that has come together in inhomogeneous spurts of development over the last 30 years. Its strength lies in its unbiased access to important works of art from five cultural regions: Europe, North America, Eastern Europe, Latin America and Asia.
This content has been machine translated.Öffnungszeiten
Future events by Ludwig Forum Aachen
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