The German collector Thomas Borgmann has donated more than 600 works by artists such as Wolfgang Tillmans, Paulina Olowska, Cosima von Bonin and Cerith Wyn Evans to the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, a move that “augments on an international scale [our] holdings of contemporary art”, museum officials say. A selection of the works is due to go on show in an exhibition planned for late 2017.
“The composition of the gift matches the diversity of the art produced over the last twenty years, encompassing paintings, installations, collages, sculptures, photography, works on paper, and films. Of particular note is the large scale of many of the pieces,” a museum statement says. Borgmann, who used to run a gallery in Cologne from 1969 to 1985 and again in 1993-94 with Gisela Capitain, explains why he opted for a Dutch museum, saying: “I have closely followed the Stedelijk ever since my first visit in the 1960s; this museum felt like a natural home for these works.”
The donation includes Canadian artist Jack Goldstein’s complete canon of 16mm film works made in the 1970s and 1980s. Meanwhile, Subject Driven, an installation by the US artist Matt Mullican, “offers an overview of his entire body of work, created between 1970 and 2008… and includes more than 180 individual [pieces]”, according to the museum statement. Wyn Evans’s neon installation One of the most notorious …. (2008), Tillmans’s 1995 work Deranged Granny (self) and Lucy McKenzie’s 2004 Untitled photograph will also enter the collection.
