THE STORAGE ROOM - VOLCANO OF SERENITY
Yehudit Sasportas
Udo Kittelmann
About Udo Kittelmann
Born in Düsseldorf, Germany, in 1958, Udo Kittelmann is the former director of the Nationalgalerie in Berlin, part of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (2008–2020), which includes the Alte Nationalgalerie, Neue Nationalgalerie, Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwartskunst, and Museum Berggruen, among others.
From 1994 to 2001, Kittelmann served as Director of the Kölnischer Kunstverein in Cologne. Between 2002 and 2008, he was Director of the Museum für Moderne Kunst (MMK) in Frankfurt. In 2001, he was commissioner of the German Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, where he curated Gregor Schneider’s Totes Haus ur, which received the Golden Lion for Best National Participation. In 2013, he curated the Russian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, presenting Vadim Zakharov’s project Danaë.
Over the course of his long career as a curator and museum director, Kittelmann has explored curatorial practices and support systems that expand the relationship between art and institutions. He focuses on artistic processes, examining their implicit structures and and potential display configurations. His curatorial approach is grounded in close collaboration with artists, emphasizing the installation of their works, moving beyond purely aesthetic considerations, and engaging with the specific socio-political contexts of each artwork.
In 2017, he curated the exhibition The Boat is Leaking. The Captain Lied. - developed through a dialogue with artist Thomas Demand, filmmaker Alexander Kluge, and theatre designer Anna Viebrock, presented at Fondazione Prada in Venice. He also curated Liu Ye’s solo exhibition Storytelling, shown at Prada Rong Zhai in Shanghai and at Fondazione Prada in Milan in 2018 and 2020, respectively.
In 2020, he conceived the exhibition project K, presented at Fondazione Prada in Milan, featuring works by Martin Kippenberger, Orson Welles, and Tangerine Dream, inspired by three novels by Franz Kafka. His recent project, Human Brains: It Begins with an Idea, explores the investigative processes of neuroscience. Developed in collaboration with artist Taryn Simon, it was presented at Fondazione Prada in Venice in conjunction with the Venice Biennale (2022).
His projects also include Anne Imhof’s opera Angst II and Adrian Piper’s The Probable Trust Registry, among others. For Museum Frieder Burda in Baden-Baden, he conceived the exhibition Value and Transformation of Corals by Margaret and Christine Wertheim. For Centro Botín in Santander, Spain, he is set to present a project juxtaposing Tino Sehgal’s work with that of El Greco.