Pierre Soulages is one of the outstanding personalities in 20th-century non-figurative painting and the best-known living artist in France. His work is indelibly inscribed on the history of contemporary art, from his early beginnings in the aftermath of the Second World War right up to the current day – a span of more than 70 years.
He is also a painter of the century in the literal sense. Born on 24 December 1919 in Rodez in southern France, Soulages celebrated his hundredth birthday in 2019 with an exclusive exhibition at the Louvre in Paris. His creative productivity, which has been marked from the very start by a radical artistic consciousness and a resilient, defiant stance, has withstood the forces of time and continues unabated, as his latest large-scale pictures, on show at the exhibition, amply demonstrate.
In order to maintain the integral nature of the Collection and make it accessible to the public, a museum was built in Frieder Burda's home city of Baden-Baden. The plans have been drafted by the New York architect Richard Meier. The Museum Frieder Burda was inaugurated in the autumn of 2004 and will be fully financed and run by the Foundation Frieder Burda which was established in 1998.
The new museum for twentieth- and twenty-first-century art has been designed to integrate into the lush landscape of the Lichtentaler Allee Park and, at the same time, to harmonize in scale with the classical profile of the adjacent Staatliche Kunsthalle in Baden-Baden. Great efforts were taken to preserve as many trees as possible on the site, so that the Museum Frieder Burda would be harmoniously incorporated into the nature surrounding it. The overall form and proportions of the new building correspond to the elevated plinth and entablature of the Neoclassical Kunsthalle, but each institution maintains its own tectonic identity.
Numerous high-caliber exhibitions with Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke, Katharina Grosse, William N. Copley, Andreas Gursky and James Turrell, among others, have been exhibited at the Museum Frieder Burda. In addition, thematic exhibitions such as "The pictures do something to me" or "America! America!". Frieder Burda, honorary citizen of the city of Baden-Baden, has always been a matter close to his heart for the committed and profound mediation of art with a social claim through the museum's art workshop.
In the late nineteenth century, many Russian artists took inspiration from the themes and techniques of the French impressionists. Portraying scenes of Russian everyday life en plein air, they tried to capture the fleeting moment in their paintings. Artists like Natalia Goncharova, Mikhail Larionov, and Kazimir Malevich, who later formed the avant-garde, developed their own new art from impressionist studies of light. Showing how international their pictorial language had become by 1900, the exhibition will integrate these Russian artists into the project of European modern art.
An exhibition of the Museum Frieder Burda, Baden-Baden, and the Museum Barberini, Potsdam, in collaboration with the State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow
The Museum Frieder Burda offers its visitors a diverse education programme for all age groups. In addition to regular public tours of the current exhibitions, we also offer private tours with experienced art educators. These tours, which are non-refundable and must be reserved in advance, include immediate entry to exhibitions without waiting or queueing.
Salon Berlin is Museum Frieder Burda’s new exhibition and project space at the Auguststraße 11- 13 in Berlin. Closely connected with the Museum in Baden-Baden, Salon Berlin, under the curatorial direction of Patricia Kamp, presents the diverse aspects of the museum programme and the Frieder Burda Collection. The exhibition space sees itself as a forum for international contemporary art, both a showroom and a space for experimentation for Museum Frieder Burda.
More than just a museum store. In addition to catalogs, art prints and posters, the Museum Frieder Burda Concept Store offers a wide range of exclusive jewelry as well as highly decorative furnishings such as vases, tableware, textiles and even individual pieces of furniture. The idea behind the concept: Everything you see can be bought.
The Concept Store can also be visited without a museum ticket. Simply contact our staff in the checkout area.