Dr Kathleen Reinhardt is taking over as director of the Georg Kolbe Museum in Berlin. This was announced by the chairman of the board of trustees, the Berlin architect Matthias Muffert. The cultural scientist and art historian with a doctorate and current curator of contemporary art at the Albertinum of the Dresden State Art Collections succeeds Dr Julia Wallner and will take up the post in December 2022.
image above: Dr. Kathleen Reinhardt, courtesy of Georg Kolbe Museum.
On the recommendation of the appointed search committee, the Board of Trustees has unanimously elected Kathleen Reinhardt. “With Dr. Kathleen Reinhardt as the new director, the Georg Kolbe Museum will be led by a strong personality with profound knowledge of artistic engagement with our present,” says André Schmitz, board member of the Georg Kolbe Foundation and former Berlin State Secretary for Culture. She has many years of experience in various cultural institutions and a large international network. Together with Ms Wallner, we have succeeded in recent years in firmly positioning the Kolbe Museum and its work in the first rank of German artists’ museums. I think Ms Reinhardt will now link the museum’s many relevant topics to important global discourses and thus further develop the house.”
Kathleen Reinhardt studied Cultural Studies and International Management at the Universities of Bayreuth, Amsterdam and Los Angeles and completed her PhD in Art History at the Department of African Art at the Freie Universität Berlin. Since 2016, she has been curator and curator of contemporary art at the Albertinum of the Dresden State Art Collections, where she initiated important collection acquisitions, edited artists’ publications and was responsible for a series of highly acclaimed exhibitions and programmes. She has curated monographic exhibitions with Marlene Dumas (Skulls 2017), Slavs and Tatars (Made in Dschermany 2018), Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt and David Horvitz (For Ruth, the Sky in Los Angeles 2018), worked with artists including Céline Wolf-Rehfeldt and David Horvitz (For Ruth, the Sky in Los Angeles 2018) and others. with artists* such as Céline Condorelli, Kapwani Kiwanga, Judy Radul, Nasan Tur, Henrike Naumann, Emeka Ogboh and Hassan Khan, among others, and organised the seminal group exhibition 1 Million Roses for Angela Davis and most recently the research and exhibition project Revolutionary Romances. Transcultural Art Histories in the GDR. Previously, she directed the studios of Berlin-based artists Candice Breitz and Petrit Halilaj. Her previous positions include documenta 12, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection Venice and the Goethe-Institut Palermo. Kathleen Reinhardt has also taught at the FU Berlin, the TU Dresden and the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Braunschweig.
Commenting on her new position at the Georg Kolbe Museum, Kathleen Reinhardt says: “I am looking forward to my new task at one of Berlin’s most beautiful museums and to expanding the excellent work the museum has done so far. I would like to intensify local and international partnerships for a common broadening of thinking about and with art. The core of my approach is to situate and understand art and artists in the context of their time and ours, and I look forward to tackling this together with the team at the Georg Kolbe Museum”.
The selection committee was equally convinced by her interesting connections to the work of Georg Kolbe as well as her strong connection to national and international contemporary art. The director of the Berlinische Galerie, Dr. Thomas Köhler, a member of the board of trustees and the search committee, is convinced that Kathleen Reinhardt has extensive curatorial and institutional experience, as well as great communicative talent: “I am curious to see how she will further develop the profile of the Georg Kolbe Museum and contextualise Kolbe’s work and relate it to contemporary artists.”
The museum in Berlin’s Westend is located in the listed artists’ house of the sculptor Georg Kolbe (1877-1947), a functional, Bauhaus-influenced ensemble from 1928 with an interior sculpture garden. Founded in 1950 as a foundation for the development, preservation and mediation of Kolbe’s artistic legacy, the house today sees itself as a place of exchange and research. With exhibitions and educational programmes on classical modernism and contemporary art, the museum promotes a lively dialogue that links historical questions with the present. On 14 September, as part of the Berlin Art Week, the Georg Kolbe Museum opens the exhibition Mona Hatoum, a cooperation project of the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, the KINDL – Centre for Contemporary Art and the Georg Kolbe Museum.
WHERE?
Georg Kolbe Museum, Sensburger Allee 25, 14055 Berlin-Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf
