Harald Falckenberg

Aus dem Maschinenraum der Kunst
Aufzeichnungen eines Sammlers
VOLUME 168

Studies and Reflections by a Defining Collector of Our Time

“Art after the failure of the grand societal models must needs be sly, grotesque, playful, and yet politically and socially subversive and poetic”: that was Harald Falckenberg’s credo. And so the patron collected unconventional art; his name is associated with artists like John Bock, Andrea Fraser, Sarah Lucas, Monica Bonvicini, Thomas Hirschhorn, Paul McCarthy, Astrid Klein, Christoph Schlingensief, and Santiago Sierra, whose works time and again transgress the bounds of what is socially approved and expected.

Released after Harald Falckenberg’s death, this reprint of the volume Im Maschinenraum der Kunst gathers the reflections and positions of a collector whose notes on contemporary art and the art world illustrate that he was keenly aware of the theoretical underpinnings of his activities. Falckenberg was less interested in the work of art as such or the contexts that art historians and scholars of culture might illuminate than in the artists and the social realities with which they engaged.

With an afterword by Wolfgang Ullrich, and a new foreword by Larissa Falckenberg and Matthias Kliefoth.

Harald Falckenberg (b. Hamburg, 1943; d. Hamburg, 2023) obtained a doctorate in law and was active as an entrepreneur while also building one of the most important collections of contemporary art in Germany. The Falckenberg Collection comprises over 2,200 works by 450 artists, with a focus on the art of the counterculture that emerged in the U.S., Germany, and elsewhere after 1945 in a rebellion against elites and the art establishment. In 2001, the collection moved into the Phoenix-Hallen in Harburg, a borough of Hamburg; in 2011, it was entrusted on permanent loan to the Deichtorhallen, Hamburg.

Wolfgang Ullrich (b. Munich, 1967) was professor of art studies and media theory at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design from 2006 until 2015. Since then he has worked as a freelance writer, cultural scholar, and consultant. He lives in Leipzig.