Art Unites! The early years of the collection   22.04. – 20.08.2023

Art Unites! The early years of the collection

200 years ago, local art lovers already followed the idea of crowdfunding. On 14 November 1823, they founded the Kunstverein in Bremen, which today is one of the oldest art societies and the largest in Germany. The exhibition “Art Unites!“ invites you back to the early days of the  Kunstverein, presents the makers and mile stones in this founding history and gives an exciting insight into the bourgeois taste of the first half of the 19th century.

Graphics by Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein, Giovanni Battista Piranesi and Peter Paul Rubens as well as paintings by Pieter Wouwerman and Masolino da Panicale and numerous other works illustrate how the initially small association built up an impressive collection through acquisitions and gifts.

Accompanying this, the artists Samuel Nyholm and Olav Westphalen are staging the founding of a new association in the Old Cabinet until 10 September 2023. As VEGA – Verein für erzählerische Geschichtsaufarbeitung (Association for the Narrative Reappraisal of History) – they engage in a humorous analysis of bureaucratic structures and at the same time a free  narrative processing of works from the collection of the Department of Prints and Drawings.

The New Cabinet provides a glimpse of the high and low points of 200 years of the Kunstverein.

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