Last week, Deutsche Bank and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation announced a formal end to a 15-year collaboration at a special press lunch in New York. Richard Armstrong, the director of the Guggenheim, and Stefan Krause, Deutsche Bank Management Board member and Chairman of the Global Art Steering Committee, spoke at the briefing of the fruitful commissions the partnership had seen by artists Jeff Koons, Gerhard Richter, James Rosenquis, Andreas Slominski, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Bill Viola, Lawrence Weiner, Rachel Whiteread, Pawel Althamer, John Baldessari, Hanne Darboven, William Kentridge, Julie Mehretu, Agathe Snow, Gabriel Orozco, Jeff Wall, and Phoebe Washburn.
Armstrong also revealed that Deutsche Bank would be gifting commissioned projects by nine artists – Althamer, Baldessari, Darboven, Kentridge, Mehretu, Orozco, Snow, Wall, and Washburn – to the museum.
Each project was specifically created for the Deutsche Guggenheim site in Berlin starting in 1997. That space will close early this spring and then reopen as the Deutsche Bank Kunsthalle this April. The Kunsthalle will continue to present the Deutsche Bank Artist of the Year initiative (this year’s recipient being Imran Qureshi) and remain a globally oriented platform for contemporary art.
