In 2003 we started working on the visitors guidance system for the Rieckhallen, an old storage depot next to the Hamburger Bahnhof which was about to be converted by Kuehn Malvezzi into a huge Kunsthalle, the new home of the Friedrich Christian Flick Collection for at least 7 years.

In spring of 2008 Friedrich Christian Flick made a gift to the Nationalgalerie of 166 works from his collection, among them pieces by Georg Baselitz, Bruce Nauman, Paul McCarthy, Dieter Roth, Richard Artschwager, Isa Genzken/Wolfgang Tillmans, Stan Douglas, Rodney Graham, Pipilotti Rist, Urs Fischer, and Christoph Büchel.

Friedrich Christian Flick explains: "We selected the works for their importance as museum pieces, most of them key works in the careers of their respective artists. Whenever I've developed an interest in a particular artist and decided that I like his or her art I've always tried to collect the artist's work in depth and put together blocks of works. I wanted this donation, too, to reflect that approach. I have also given a lot of thought to works that have a direct or indirect connection to Berlin or Germany. I say goodbye to many of my favourite pieces and I do it with joy but also with a bit of melancholy. More than anything, though, I do it with complete confidence in Berlin, in the full knowledge that I am doing the right thing for the artists and the right thing for the museum."

Says Klaus-Dieter Lehmann: "This gift is much more than the gesture of a collector. With regard to the stock already held by the Museum the items have been intelligently selected and the donation is an extraordinary expression of common understanding on how a collection might be created. The almost four years of collaboration with Friedrich Christian Flick have borne wonderful fruit in the form of this generous donation of art works."

The guidance system we had developed for the Rieckhallen was then, since it is an extension to the Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart Berlin (Part of the Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin) connected through a tunnel-bridge, growing into the museum. Otherwise it didn’t make much sense to create two different systems. As a visitor it would be just confusing, we guessed.

The guidance system is still in place to date in the museum.

Find here the introductory campaign for the Collection.