The Frieder Burda Collection

The Frieder Burda Collection, consisting of around one thousand works of modern and contemporary art—including paintings, sculptures, objects, photographs, and works on paper—ranks among the preeminent private collections of art in Europe and is unsurpassed in terms of caliber.

Frieder Burda first encountered paintings by German Expressionists in his parents' house as a child. His parents, Senator Franz Burda and Aenne Burda, were successful entrepreneurs who owned printing presses and publishing houses in the postwar period. They embodied the recovery and glamour of the new, modern Germany. At an early stage, Senator Burda began collecting works by Max Beckmann, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel, and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. It was in this art-filled environment that Frieder Burda developed his own distinctive approach to collecting that evolved over the decades.

For more than half a century, Frieder Burda brought together iconic and relevant works of German and international art of the postwar and contemporary periods. The spectrum ranged from Abstract Expressionism, including works by artists such as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Mark Rothko, to American Pop Art and the titans of German art after 1960: Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke, and Georg Baselitz, the artists of his own generation. In addition, he was passionate about Pablo Picasso's late oeuvre. Frieder Burda's curiosity and openness also enabled him to shift directions and explore other media, young artists such as Katharina Grosse and Neo Rauch, and photography by Andreas Gursky and Rodney Graham.

This resulted in a collection that was tailored to his personal tastes and consistently challenged formal and content-related boundaries while also searching for roots, a collection that convincingly reflects the collector's artistic and aesthetic vision and captures his appreciation of sensuous beauty and expressivity. Most of all, he was driven by a fascination with color and the emotional qualities of artistic expression.

In his exploration of art, Frieder Burda found a source of life-giving energy and inspiration. By building a museum, he provided his collection with a permanent location that allowed him to share his enthusiasm for art.

Discover 100 selected works from the Frieder Burda Collection.