Time and again, it proves both productive and exciting when contemporary artists perceive the examination of the collection of a museum as inspiration that enables them to enrich their own language and develop concrete occasions for articulation. In our case it was artist Tara Mahapatra, currently living in Berlin and New York, who, determined and with a thirst for discovery, ventured out into the collection's thicket of references between late Gothic sculpture and recent art production and also examined its singular entanglement with architecture and the surrounding parklands. From the outset, however, she was focused on the work and influence of Joseph Beuys, who, as is generally known, had his studio in the ground floor right wing from 1957 to 1964, where he laid important foundations for the Expanded Concept of Art that would later prove so consequential. (...)
Read the full Text by Harald Kunde (Director, Museum Kurhaus Kleve)