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The Zander Collection Is Taking a New Direction

Thanks to its roughly 4,500 works of Naïve, Outsider, and Folk Art, the Zander Collection has a unique focus. Charlotte Zander (1930–2014) assembled this collection over more than 60 years, and it features key groups of works by classic Naïve artists, such as André Bauchant, Camille Bombois, Morris Hirshfield, Séraphine Louis, Henri Rousseau, Adalbert Trillhaase, Louis Vivin, and Alfred Wallis. Since 1996, these works have been kept and presented at Schloss Bönnigheim, a castle located in Bönnigheim. During this period, 37 thematic and monographic exhibitions have been shown there.

After the collector Charlotte Zander died in 2014, the collection became a non-profit limited liability company (gGmbH). Since then, Susanne Zander, the founder’s daughter, has served as the chief executive officer of the organization. During this time, curators were invited to come and realize several exhibitions – for example, Susanne Pfeffer’s 27 Künstler. 209 Werke (27 Artists. 209 Works), and Veit Loers and Andreas Fischer’s Be Happy! We do not forget you. With a look back at the exhibitions organized by Charlotte Zander, Susanne Zander will curate the last exhibition to be held in Schloss Bönnigheim in April 2020, which will be on show until the end of May 2020, after which the collection will leave Bönnigheim.

After 24 years of continuous exhibition work and presenting the collection in the historical rooms of Schloss Bönnigheim, the Zander Collection will be taking a new direction. Its goal will be to continue to ensure optimal, forward-looking conditions for providing art education, research, and exhibition opportunities for its artworks in the long-term.

The current rewriting of the art historical canon, which began at institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York and here in Germany at the Museum Folkwang in Essen and the Nationalgalerie in Berlin narrates art history from more diverse and global perspectives and is also a goal for the Zander Collection. The aim is therefore to support the new research, reevaluation, and re-contextualization of Naïve and Outsider Art – the development of which runs parallel to modernism and contemporary art – as well as its integration into existing museum collections as part of art history.