For more than 50 years, the Kunstmuseum has been collecting contemporary photography. Over 400 works and series have been accumulated in the process, comprising a total of several thousand photographs. As part of the funding program “Forschungsvolontariat Kunstmuseen NRW,” the collection has been systematically documented and researched and will be presented anew in the special exhibition German Caviar.

With a focus on photographic art produced in Germany since 1965, the photographic collection offers a unique perspective on half a century marked by the rapidly accelerating neoliberal capitalism that has shaped the way we think and feel and increasingly entangled life, art, and culture in processes of commercialization.

The starting point of the exhibition is therefore the dual role of photography in a system, in which it serves to drive desire in a society of mass consumption as utility, documentary and advertising photography, but which, (in the hands of artists) can at the same time become a means to challenge the dominant system. In the exhibition, relationships between financial and art markets, between artwork and commodity, artists and the entrepreneurial self are addressed, as are questions about the changing role of photography in society.

With works by Lewis Baltz, Bernd & Hilla Becher, Rudolf Bonvie, Christo & Jeanne-Claude, Walther Dahn, Felix Droese, Achim Duchow, Ceal Floyer, Andreas Gursky, Jürgen Klauke, Astrid Klein, Christof Kohlhöfer, Sigmar Polke, Timm Rautert, Michael Reisch, Ulrike Rosenbach, Katharina Sieverding, Heidi Specker, Thomas Struth, Ilona & Wolfgang Weber, Herbert Wentscher, Nicole Wermers and others