Maarten Liefooghe - Künstlermuseen: Monographic architecture between the artist-specific and the generic

In architecture reviews, artist museums are invariably treated as exceptional, almost one-off design commissions. Also, there is always an expectation that these museum buildings would be designed entirely "tailored to" the specific artist at hand. Can a spatial, narrative and visual symbiosis between a place, person, collection, and building be established here - an accordance such as hardly seems possible in regular art museums with their heterogeneous collections? How should we appreciate these somewhat naive cultural expectations of encounter, specificity, tailoring, interpretation, portrayal? And can/should architecture (completely) satisfy them?

In his talk, Maarten Liefooghe questions this enticing interlocking and instead looks for the clashes within artist museums between the generic logic of the artist museum as a person memorial, as an art museum, and as an archive, each representing different logics of collection, placement, and visitation. In these overlapping and colliding logics lies something essential for artist museums, but it also requires constant negotiation. We explore this in concrete examples, from Scarpa's expansion for the Gipsotheca Canoviana to the RCR-designed Musée Soulages.

About the speaker:

Maarten Liefooghe is associate professor in architectural theory, history and criticism at Ghent University, Belgium. He publishes on museums and exhibitions, on contemporary architectural culture and on the latter’s interactions with heritage. He is also a member of the editorial board of OASE Journal for Architecture.