In spring 2011 Chris Dercon, director of the Haus der Kunst, will leave for London, where he will take over as director of the Tate Modern. He will continue to work with the Haus der Kunst supervising the exhibition, ‘Carlo Mollino, Rigorously Eclectic', planned for fall 2011. His successor, to be named by the Ministry, will take up the post in fall 2011.
Dercon's first exhibition at the Haus der Kunst was a surprise for the international art world: With the exhibition ‘Partners' (2003) works from the renowned Ydessa Hendeles Art Foundation were presented to the public for the first time. Dercon continued to set a programmatical course through the means of surprise and detection: In 2004/2005 he opened the Haus der Kunst's Historical Archives to the public; today the holdings of the archives are examined, catalogued and accessible for research purposes. His initiatives also led to the removal of the additions made to the building after the war - regarded as a kind of architectural denazification - in order to make the original structure visible. At the same time he regularly invited contemporary artists to work with the building and to reinterpret it. And so, in 2005, Paul McCarthy decorated the building's roof with a larger-than-life bouquet of flowers, and last year Ai Weiwei installed 9,000 school backpacks on its façade.
Under the direction of Chris Dercon the program came to include architecture, design, fashion, photography and film. Outstanding exhibitions and projects in these fields were those of Herzog & de Meuron, Konstantin Grcic, Maison Martin Margiela, Andreas Gursky and Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Golden Palm in Cannes 2010 for his film project that began in 2009 with an installation in the Haus der Kunst). Furthermore, resolutely built collections, such as Herman and Nicole Daled's collection of conceptual art and the Generali Foundation's dedicated to media and performance art, were honoured with their own exhibitions.
The Tate Modern already demonstrated their recognition of Chris Dercon in 2006 by overtaking his exhibition, "Amrita Sher-Gil. An Indian Artist Family of the Twentieth Century." Now Chris Dercon will be responsible not just for the Tate Modern's exhibition program but also for its collection. The Haus der Kunst team congratulates him on this new challenge.