The Kallmann Museum in Ismaning opens the exhibition "The Lothar Schirmer Collection – Contemporary Art from Cy Twombly to Peter Handke" on Sunday, October 5th at 3 pm. To mark the 80th birthday of the important Munich collector and publisher Lothar Schirmer, a representative selection of his outstanding collection of contemporary art will be presented. On display are paintings, photographs, drawings, and objects by influential figures in 20th-century art history. Works by Joseph Beuys, Cy Twombly, Cindy Sherman, Jeff Wall, Claes Oldenburg, Bernd and Hilla Becher, and August Sander are featured, as well as Andreas Gursky, Candida Höfer, Thomas Struth, and Thomas Ruff, and important figures in contemporary German painting and sculpture such as Cornelius Völker, Martin Assig, and Wiebke Siem. With a touch of humor, treasures from Old Masters by Gabriel von Max, Philipp Otto Runge, and Jean-Étienne Liotard are also integrated into the presentation. A total of around 100 works by 35 artists from the 18th to the 21st century will be on display in Ismaning. They present the highlights of an extraordinary collection that arose from personal preferences while simultaneously encompassing key positions in contemporary art and photography.
Lothar Schirmer began his collecting career, spanning more than six decades, as a seventeen-year-old schoolboy. Driven by a youthful passion for the art of his time, he acquired his first works by Cy Twombly and Joseph Beuys in the 1960s on a tight budget, sometimes paying in installments, demonstrating even then a visionary eye for important movements within contemporary art. His personal encounters with these two artists, whom Schirmer visited in their studios in Rome and Düsseldorf, also marked the beginning of close and friendly relationships with the artists he collected, relationships that sometimes lasted for decades. These relationships deepened when Lothar Schirmer founded the Schirmer/Mosel publishing house in Munich in 1974. He published important monographs on most of the artists represented in his collection, thus intertwining collecting with publishing.
The Ismaning exhibition reflects, as a characteristic of the collection, its compilation of extensive groups of works, representing many of the artists. The first and largest section of the exhibition is dedicated to photography, beginning with early vintage prints of Berlin cityscapes by Heinrich Zille. Drawing, another focus of the collection, is represented in a form characterized by particular sensitivity and delicacy. Contemporary German painting is represented by large-format works by Martin Assig and Cornelius Völker, while the psychologically charged sculptural works of Wiebke Siem represent an important position in contemporary sculpture.