Old Masters on the Move – New Presentation of the Permanent Collection
Who says artworks can’t go on blind dates? The Upper Gallery of the Alte Pinakothek is now home to completely new groupings of paintings, creating utterly unaccustomed encounters and scintillating dialogues. In re-hanging the permanent exhibition of the collection, some two hundred paintings have been moved to different places. Throughout the Upper Gallery rooms, they now engage in new encounters opened up by unexpected contexts. Featuring dialogical juxtapositions and thematically arranged clusters of works, the new display invites visitors to rediscover familiar masterpieces. For the first time in the history of the Alte Pinakothek, the traditional hanging scheme, developed along chronological and geographical lines, has been consciously challenged, resulting in a considered reordering of the display. Many of the museum’s best-known works, previously shown in separate galleries far apart, are now close neighbors, despite belonging to different epochs and styles. Their unusual juxtaposition reveals hidden parallels and directs our attention to rarely thematized connections and shared qualities. This generates new perspectives on the paintings and their creators, on the content and form of the images, as well as on the contexts in which they were produced.

Bernd Ebert

Alte Pinakothek, Munich
Dr. Bernd Ebert has been Chief Curator for Dutch and German Baroque Painting at the Alte Pinakothek in Munich since 2013. He has co-curated diverse exhibitions and edited catalogues, including Utrecht, Caravaggio and Europe with the Centraal Museum in Utrecht and Jacobus Vrel with the Mauritshuis and the Fondation Custodia, Frits Lugt Collection in Paris. He started his career at the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (National Museums in Berlin) in 2005, co-curating the exhibition Circle Sphere Cosmos at Pergamon Museum.