After spending his first six months on the job quietly getting to know the Denver Art Museum’s collection and the local art scene, Christoph Heinrich, the institution’s curator of modern and contemporary art, is ready to kick the department into high gear.
“Now I think it’s time to stick out my head and to say what I would like to do,” said Heinrich, former chief curator of contemporary art, collections and exhibitions at Germany’s Hamburg Kunsthalle.
Last week, he unveiled plans for an ambitious series of exhibitions and other programs designed to dramatically escalate the museum’s contemporary offerings and boost its international profile in the field.
“One goal is to put the Denver Art Museum on the map for a contemporary program,” Heinrich said. “So far, the collection has been built up and the new building was put together, and that was all challenging and needed a lot of energy.
“But now, with a new building, I think it’s really time to think about a contemporary program. It’s a contemporary building, and it deserves an interesting and recognized program that is of interest to the Denver public, but also could be of some interest to a nationwide public.”
Heinrich plans to put most of the focus on work produced in the past 30 years, in part because the bulk of the museum’s holdings fall within that period. (There is no clear demarcation between modern and contemporary, but the dividing line could be dated to the end of minimalism in the 1970s and the concurrent rise of postmodernism.)
“The modern collection is a beautiful little jewel box,” he said, “but it’s in no way comparable to the modern collections of some of the museums here in the U.S.
“So, unless it rains dollars tomorrow, we won’t have the possibility to follow up and to keep up, so I think it’s really the best thing to focus on the contemporary program.
“If you want to do a substantial Picasso show or a substantial Modigliani show or something like that, it really would probably need other budgets than what we have right now.”
In addition to lectures and other outreach activities, Heinrich envisions three main thrusts to the contemporary department’s offerings:
A major temporary exhibition each year.The museum announced last week that it will present “Daniel Richter: A Major Survey,” a touring retrospective Heinrich organized in his previous post in Germany. It will open Sept. 8 and run through Jan. 4.
The show will include 25 paintings and a selection of small-format works by the painter, who was born in Germany in 1962 and got his start designing posters and record sleeves for punk bands in the 1980s.
For late 2009, Heinrich is planning a large-scale exhibition tentatively titled “Embrace!” It will assemble 15-17 artists from around the world, including Jessica Stockholder, Katharina Grosse and Matthew Brannon, who will create site-specific works for the angled, sloping spaces in the Hamilton Building.Regular rotations of the permanent collection. Heinrich foresees complete rotations every 18 months of the contemporary galleries on the third and fourth floors of the Hamilton Building.
Each set of works from the permanent collection will center on a theme. A reinstallation underway now and expected to be completed by August revolves around the human figure. Future themes might be space and the gesture.
“The collection is huge, and I was really surprised by what we have,” he said. “I think it is part of my job to bring this out and show this to the public.”
Biannual small-scale exhibitions.The museum is converting a room on the third floor into a works-on-paper gallery in which Heinrich plans to present exhibitions that change every six months.
The space will debut in April with a presentation of “Varied Voices,” a 2007 suite of 18 original prints by artists from across the country. The project was spearheaded by Melanie Yazzie, a member of the art faculty at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
Another room will be used as a project space for experimental, sometimes site-specific works. The first offering will be a video work by German artist Bjorn Melhus.
With last fall’s opening of the Museum of Contemporary Art/Denver’s new building and the rise of such alternative venues as the Laboratory of Art and Ideas at Belmar, Heinrich believes 2008 is the ideal time to set his plans into motion.
“If there is a time to think about a contemporary program in Denver, Colorado, it’s now,” he said.
Kyle MacMillan: 303-954-1675 or kmacmillan@denverpost.com
