Hello World: Revising a Collection

What might the collections of Western art galleries look like today if a global understanding of art had informed their development? Subjecting its collection to a critical revision, the National Gallery in Berlin investigates, looking at artworks from non-European centers of modernism and exploring the untold stories and overlooked connections behind them.
            Accompanying a large-scale exhibition featuring artworks from all over the world, this catalog considers exchanges like the Dadaist Tomoyoshi Murayama’s sojourn to Berlin in the 1920s, the painter Heinrich Vogeler’s turn to the Soviet Union in the 1930s, and the famous Fluxus artist Joseph Beuys’s collaborations with Argentinian ecologist Nicolás García Uriburu in the 1980s. Marking a paradigm shift in a globalizing present, this revised narrative of art from 1900 to the present explores the historical, international, and transregional connections undergirding the great art movements of the twentieth century. 
 

Udo Kittelmann is a German curator and museum director of the National Gallery in Berlin and the author of numerous books and other publications about contemporary and modern art.