The Ahlers Pro Arte Foundation is a non-profit organization (gemeinnützige GmbH) founded in 1995 in Herford by the textile manufacturer Jan A. Ahlers, together with his daughter, Dr. Stella A. Ahlers.

The foundation supports fine art, literature and music. Its principle task is researching and producing academic documentation of the influence of German expressionism on the development of art in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Hanover

In 2005, the foundation moved to Warmbüchenstraße 16 in Hanover. The building was of particular historical interest as it had been home to the Kestnergesellschaft between 1948 and 1997. For decades, this had been an influential means of distributing and responding to contemporary art in German-speaking countries. The Ahlers Pro Arte Foundation continued this tradition with a series of exhibitions, lectures and musical evenings.

Herford

In autumn 2016, the foundation moved from Hanover to Herford. However, this did not signal any change in its focus or future goals. In December 2016, two lecture events marked the foundation’s Herford debut. September 2017 saw the opening of its first exhibition in the new location: Gesicht und Maske: Rollenspiele in der Porträtkunst.

For more information, see Ausstellungen and Veranstaltungen

Collection

The foundation also works to build up its own collection of art. In line with its mission, the foundation’s main interests lie both in German expressionism and in the influential artistic trends that have developed in Europe in the wake of the Second World War, which still maintain traces of their expressionist heritage.

Partnerships and loans

The Ahlers Pro Arte Foundation works with prominent museums in order to make the ahlers collection accessible to the public in the context of significant museum collections: objects relating to the art of German expressionism are on show at the Franz Marc Museum in Kochel am See, an institution with which the Ahlers Pro Arte Foundation has been working for many years. In addition, the Sprengel Museum Hanover is also a trusted cooperation partner. The foundation has permanently loaned its comprehensive selection of post-1945 art to the Sprengel Museum for the purposes of research and exhibitions.

It is only with the assistance of private and institutional loans that substantial, academically ambitious exhibition projects can be brought to fruition. This is why it always been important to the Ahlers Pro Arte Foundation, since its founding, to develop partnerships with individual museums and art institutions, as well as to support exhibitions both at home and abroad by loaning artworks.

  • Ludwig Forum Aachen

    Louisiana Museum, Humlebæk (DK)

    Fondation Beyeler, Basel

    ZKM, Karlsruhe

    Tinguely Museum, Basel

    Tate Liverpool

    Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin

    Puschkin Museum, Moskau

    Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern

    Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau, München

    Guggenheim Bilbao

    Langen Foundation, Neuss

    BOZAR, Brüssel

    Neue Galerie, New York

    Kunsthalle Emden

    Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris

    Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, Florenz

    Kunstmuseum Stuttgart

    Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt am Main

    Moderna Museet, Stockholm

    Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main

    Kunsthalle Tübingen

    Hamburger Kunsthalle

    La Biennale di Venezia, Venedig

    Bucerius Kunst Forum, Hamburg

    Kunsthaus Zürich

Exhibition activities

The 2005 exhibition Dieter Roth: Bücher was the first to be held in Hanover by the Ahlers Pro Arte Foundation. It was followed by other exhibitions, featuring the works of artists including Yves Klein, Emil Nolde, Bernhard Luginbühl and Thomas Herbst, the North German impressionist. From the very beginning, care was taken to present the collection in all its diversity, whilst still shedding light on the myriad connections and interactions that shaped the artistic development of modernism. Highlights include retrospectives of the work of Gabriele Münter and Dieter Roth – two artists with whom the founder of the Ahlers Pro Arte Foundation, Jan A. Ahlers, was personally acquainted. The exhibition ZERO–Nouveau Réalisme also stands out for being the first to place both important artistic movements in comparative perspective; the exhibition’s opening was attended by Jacques Villeglé himself, nearly ninety years old at the time, who travelled from Paris especially for the occasion.

Autumn 2017 saw the first exhibition at the Ahlers Pro Arte Foundation’s new location in Herford. Entitled „Gesicht und Maske: Rollenspiele in der Porträtkunst“, it featured around eighty objects that traced the development of portraiture throughout the twentieth century. This was followed by exhibitions on a wide variety of topics, in which well-known scientists and curators from all over Germany took part. Highlights of the last few years have been the exhibitions „Von Worpswede aus: Paula Modersohn-Becker und Otto Modersohn“, „#Depicting Women: Frauenbilder in der Kunst“, „Das Lesen in der Kunst: Lektürebilder – Bildlektüre“ and „Konstruktive Welten: Anfänge einer neuen Universalsprache der Kunst“.

Event activities

The Ahlers Pro Arte Foundation's event activities began at the same time as the first exhibition. On May 11, 2005, the author, artist and musician Thomas Kapielski read to an audience from Dieter Roth's work "Da drinnen vor dem Auge"at the exhibition "Dieter Roth: Bücher". Since then, the foundation has held numerous evening events. After the foundation moved to Herford, two lecture events in December 2016 marked the start of our activities at the new location. As in the case of the exhibitions, the aim from the outset was to offer a programme that was as diverse as possible in terms of themes and format.

In addition to readings, there were lectures, panel discussions, and also song and piano evenings. The content ranged from a lecture by Henryk M. Broder on the socio-political situation in Germany (2007) to readings by Fritz J. Raddatz from his diaries (2011) and his biography of Heinrich Heine (2012), from lectures on the art historian Erwin Panofsky (2011) or Gabriele Münter's path to color (2015) to musical performances such as Franz Schubert's "Winterreise" (2012). Of particular importance with regard to the place and its tradition were the lectures by Werner Schmalenbach (2007) and Wieland Schmied (2008) about their time as director of the Kestnergesellschaft.

Since 2017, we have been focusing on the questions that are also addressed in the exhibitions in semi-annual events. For example, in autumn 2017 the focus was on portraits in the 20th century, a year later on images of women in art and in autumn 2019 on reading in art. Other topics included art and fashion (2021), nature and art (spring 2022), constructivism in the 1920s (fall 2022), the history of tourism as reflected in art (spring 2023) and women in art around 1900 (autumn 2023).

ahlers collection

Since its creation in 1995, one of the main tasks of the Ahlers Pro Arte Foundation has been building up and continually developing its own collection of art, which enables it to contribute to the variety and quality of the ahlers collection. In line with its goals, its focus lies predominantly in German expressionism. The artists of the “Blauen Reiter” (Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc, Gabriele Münter, Alexej von Jawlensky, among others) and the artist group “Brücke” (Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, among others) deserve special mention. But Emil Nolde, who was only a member of the “Brücke” for a short time, Max Beckmann and Paula Modersohn-Becker are also prominently represented in the ahlers collection.

In addition, the foundation takes an interest in the many connected artistic trends that have woven their way through the European art scene since the end of the Second World War, and in which the legacy of expressionism is still clearly evident. Examples included the international movement of nouveau réalisme (Arman, César, Raymond Hains, Yves Klein, Mimmo Roella, Daniel Spoerri, Jacques Villeglé, etc.) and ZERO (Heinz Mack, Otto Piene, Günther Uecker, etc.). Large groups of works by Dieter Roth, whose influence extended far beyond the Fluxus movement, and whose cross-disciplinary work continues to inspire many artists today, are represented in the collection alongside his contemporaries (Dorothy Iannone, Emmett Williams, etc.).

The collection’s other specialisms include, for example, Russian avant-garde art from the 1960s onwards (Grisha Bruskin, Erik Bulatov, Ilya Kabakov, Dmitri Prigov, etc.) and Chinese avant-garde art created from the 1990s onwards (Yue Minjun, Zeng Fanzhi, Zhang Xiaogang, etc.).

On Tour

The ahlers collection maintains excellent contacts with well-known museums and art institutions in Germany and abroad. Numerous works of art are loaned out for temporary exhibitions, and there are also long-term collaborations, for example with the Sprengel Museum in Hanover or the Franz Marc Museum in Kochel. The Ahlers Pro Arte foundation based in Herford also regularly exhibits items from the ahlers collection.

Publications

The Ahlers Pro Arte Foundation has produced a large number of publications. Most of these publications are catalogues from the foundation’s exhibitions, but they also include transcripts of the lectures delivered in Hanover. In some cases, the publications stem from partnerships with other art institutions or were sourced from these other institutions for exhibitions at the foundation.

You can find an overview of the publications here