Encounters with the Photographic

Over the summer, the Sammlung Moderne Kunst (Modern Art Collection) is dedicating an extensive exhibition to its significant photographic holdings. With a selection of around 250 works by more than 60 artists from the past hundred years up to the present day, this overview traces the developments in the photographic collections at the Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen (Bavarian State Painting Collections) since their creation.

When the Pinakothek der Moderne was founded in 2002, a department for photography and time-based media was established, consequently incorporating the medium of photography actively in the collections. Permanent loans from the corporate collections of Siemens (2003) and Allianz (2004) that focussed on photography from the 1970s onwards, provided a magnificent start that has been steadily built on ever since. In 2010, the collection was extensively enhanced and expanded: the gallery owners and collectors Ann and Jürgen Wilde’s photographic collection, with its emphasis on the modernist period, became affiliated to the Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen as a foundation together with the Karl Blossfeldt and Albert Renger-Patzsch artist archives. The combined holdings of both of these collections form a comprehensive body totalling some 10,000 works, allowing visitors to experience artistic photography of the highest quality with an international focus. 

New Objectivity photography in the Ann and Jürgen Wilde Foundation and the documentary conceptual photography of Bernd and Hilla Becher and their students in the Collection of Photography and Time-Based Media constitute the focal points of the respective divisions and form an introductory opening to the exhibition with their comparable concepts. Other themes presented include the detail, the landscape and wide expanses, fragments and space, the body and identity, as well as the street and society, followed by pictorial concepts which deal with life experiences that are not visible or are difficult to capture. The dialogical and often surprising encounters spanning different ages render the medium of photography visible as an art form that decisively influences our visual perception and the current discourse.

For the first time, the Collection of Photography and Time-Based Media and the Ann and Jürgen Wilde Foundation are jointly presenting milestones of artistic photography from their holdings of works from the 20th and 21st centuries in one exhibition. From renowned key works to recent acquisitions never exhibited before, the exhibition is an invitation to encounter familiar works once again and to make new discoveries.