New head of the Mercedes-Benz Art Collection: Anne Vieth succeeds Renate Wiehager

The Mercedes-Benz Art Collection gets a new director. Anne Vieth will succeed Renate Wiehager on July 1st. The 64-year-old exhibition organizer had already left the car manufacturer’s art collection in March to devote herself to other tasks. Wiehager has overseen and expanded the Mercedes-Benz Art Collection for 22 years. The collection currently includes around 3,000 works that are on display at the company’s locations as well as on loan to international museums.

The new director, Anne Vieth, is currently curator at the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart. The 43-year-old studied art history, German and Spanish literature in Hamburg and specialized in classical modern and contemporary art. After a traineeship at the Kunsthalle Mannheim, she was initially a research assistant to the director Ulrike Lorenz before she finally came to the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart in 2016 after a stint at the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden.

In recent years she has curated, among other things, an exhibition on the US painter Patrick Angus, who died young, and a special show on the subject of walls. She was also in charge of Wolfgang Laib’s solo exhibition, which will open in the middle of the month.

From now on, Anne Vieth will lead one of the largest corporate collections in the country. This was founded in 1977, initially focusing on artists from the south-west such as Adolf Hölzel, Willi Baumeister and Oskar Schlemmer. Renate Wiehager then significantly expanded and internationalized the collection. The 800 artists include Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, Charlotte Posenenske and Andrea Zittel. The focus is on abstract-constructive positions as well as commissioned work on automobility, design or construction.

In 2003, Renate Wiehager also initiated a world tour of the collection, stopping in Detroit, Singapore, Tokyo, South Africa and South America. Even then, communicating art was important to her, which is why she set up an education program and contacted schools, universities and ministries of culture. At the end of her work, Renate Wiehager is currently showing highlights from the art collection in the Mercedes-Benz Museum in Stuttgart in the automobile exhibition under the title “Moving in Stereo”.