Mercedes Benz

OFFICIAL PRESS RELEASE

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Daimler Contemporary starts into the exhibition year 2008 with “Classical : Modern II” (March 7 – June 1, 2008, Berlin)
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Daimler Art Collection continues world tour with exhibitions in Madrid and Singapore
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“Art in Public Spaces” – the theme for this year’s Mercedes-Benz Award for South African Culture

Berlin. With the opening of the “Classical : Modern II” exhibition on March 7, the Daimler Art Collection starts into the 2008 season. It is the first of four exhibitions which will be shown at the Daimler Contemporary in Haus Huth on Berlin’s Potsdamer Platz this year.

Exhibitions in 2008

The “Classical : Modern II” exhibition shows 80 works of 35 artists, most of them from southern Germany, who represent German post-war trends. Art history allocates the artists from Ackermann through to Zang to domains such as “Lyrical Abstraction”, “Informal”, “Tachism”, “Stuttgart School” and “Karlsruhe School”, “Zero” and “Zen 49”. Over and beyond this, contemporary works with references to these forerunners are displayed. The show opening tomorrow is to be seen as a sequel of the “Classical : Modern I” exhibition of 2006, which first and foremost presented Concrete and Constructivist Art, from Classical Modern through to post-war art, from the Daimler Art Collection.

The second thematic focus in 2008 is the “Private/Corporate V: Minimal Art and Minimalism” exhibition (June 20 – September 21, 2008). This is a dialogue between American representatives of Minimal Art from the Lafrenz Collection and German representatives of Minimalism from the 1960s through to today from the Daimler Art Collection.

Contemporary art from Japan and Germany will be shown in the “Art Scope” exhibition (October 10, 2008 – January 2009). Art Scope is the name of a sponsoring program, founded in 1991 by what is today Daimler AG, for young artists from Japan and Germany. The exhibition will include videos, drawings and paintings by the four award winners of 2007/2008 – Izumi Kato and Yuken Teruya from Japan as well as Eva Teppe and Ascan Pinckernelle from Germany.

Parallel to the “Art Scope” exhibition, the Daimler Contemporary will present the winners of this year’s Mercedes-Benz Award for South African Culture (October 10, 2008 – January 2009). This sponsorship award, brought into being in 1999, focuses on art in public spaces this year. The award is seen as the country’s most eminent cultural prize. It enables young South Africans engaged in the cultural sector to make their first appearances on an international scale as well as to stage major shows in their own country. The award is bestowed in different categories each year, past categories being art, jazz, sculpture, choreography, photography, poetry and architecture. Following Art in Public Spaces (2008), Fashion Design (2009) and Rhythm and Blues/Young Urban Music (2010), the award cycle will be brought to an end in 2010 – parallel to the World Cup – with a retrospective of the works of all the nominees over the years – 100 by then. This exhibition will be staged in Pretoria and Berlin.

In-house exhibitions

Apart from the exhibitions at the Daimler Contemporary in Berlin, additional presentations of works of art from the collection to the staff of Daimler AG are planned for 2008. In the “German Informal”, “Minimalism and Applied I” and “ Drawing. Paper, Space, Virtually” exhibitions at corporate locations in Germany, the employees will have the opportunity to occupy themselves directly with the art on display. The changing exhibitions in major public areas of the locations, for instance in staff restaurants and foyers, as well as regular guided tours for the staff support cultural dialogue and contribute to the development of corporate culture.

World tour of the Daimler Art Collection

The Daimler Art Collection will continue its world tour in 2008, on which it was launched in 2003. At this point in time, 150 works of contemporary art from the company’s collection are being shown in Madrid. The “Maximin” exhibition will be on until May 25, 2008. The Daimler Art Collection will then move on to Singapore.

A major element of the world tour is an extensive education program for school and university students in the respective region, designed to permit young people to grapple with the exhibition, the works of art and the artists within the framework of their school or university studies. The program was developed by experts and comprises guided tours as well as the provision of age-based books about the exhibition’s works of art.

The Daimler Art Collection

The Daimler Art Collection was founded in 1977 and currently comprises some 1,800 works of art of about 600 international artists. The focus of the collection is on Abstract-Constructivist, Conceptual and Minimal Art. It initially reflected the art trends in the greater Stuttgart area and southern Germany in the first half of the 20th century, and was soon to be expanded by the addition of related German, Swiss, European and finally international representatives of non-expressive pictorial art. This focus has been retained and is successively expanded by the addition of exemplary works from the field of new media.
You’ll find more information on the internet at: www.sammlung.daimler.com

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