Faster! Bigger! Better!

Sylvie Fleury’s neon writing from 1999 is clear and unambiguous: »Faster! Bigger! Better!«. Thus she posits maxims as they appear in advertisements, the economic marketplace, sports and everyday life. The pressure to perform is both an ordeal and a euphoric moment, an addiction to »More« that can hardly be satisfied.

Fleury’s work supplies the title for the presentation of our museum’s new collections. Signet works of our present and recently acquired private collections will be displayed on all three levels of the atriums 1 and 2. The 7000 square meters ZKM | Museum for Contemporary Art was opened in December 1999 as the »aurora borealis« of the ZKM building complex and has since then shown a wealth of works from private collections and also a series of changing exhibitions which take up the tendencies of contemporary art. The diversity and high quality of the Collections FER, Froehlich, Grässlin, Siegfried Weishaupt and Boros have recently been significantly supplemented by new partners: the Collection of the Landesbank Baden-Württemberg in Stuttgart, Francesca von Habsburg’s Collection Thyssen- Bornemisza Art Contemporary (T-B A21) with its headquarters in Vienna and the VAF-Stiftung, Frankfurt am Main /MART, Rovereto, reconfirm, together with our already proven partners, the impressive level of the ZKM | Museum for Contemporary Art. They all contribute to making our museum an important international meeting-place for contemporary art. It is a great pleasure for us to be able to show in this upcoming exhibition our many signet works and to introduce to the public to our recently acquired collections.

Faster! Bigger! Better!
The survey of approximately 220 signet works, is thus both a special exhibition of our museum itself and a reflection of the art history of the last 50 years. While on the ground floor of atrium 1 a dialogue of themes and content is unfolded among the signet works that fascinatingly displays the various collections, in atrium 2 the themes of movement and dynamics propose relations to the parallel exhibition »totalstadt. beijing case«. On the upper floor of the museum, the signet works of eight collections will be presented under the aspect of membership in their collections. Varied rooms will display paintings, photography and sculptures under museological aspects, whereby the open structure of the museum will promote communication beyond these areas and the atriums. Together with the works from the 21st century, this re-presentation of the masterpieces of probably the most interesting decades of the last century forms an aesthetic, thought-provoking and not least entertaining lobby for the exhibition of the history of recent art and its collections.