Visitors to the Tate Modern are also attracted by Anicka Yi’s translucent squid-shaped “aerobic” machine, floating in the cave Turbine Hall, And Rodin’s exquisite plaster models of arms, legs and body on display in the gallery upstairs.
The curator Achim Borchardt-Hume has passed away at the age of 56. He has participated in these two recent projects as the exhibition and project director of Tate Modern, demonstrating his ability to organize exhibitions and introducing excitement to the public. Of contemporary artists illuminates the lives and work of important historical figures.
Achim’s philosophy is that the exhibition should be able to get closer to the theme, “As a living artist, [a] people. All this means…ambition, doubt, happiness, sadness. Rodin’s exhibition is a symbol of this experiential approach: instead of showing the greatest work of this sculptor, he chose the medium of plaster, which provides us with a path to artists who we think we know about their work. way.
As an art historian and museum professional, Achim has held ambitious exhibitions (especially reinterpreting the greats of modernism) that have always focused on telling a clearly presented story to the widest possible audience. Picasso 1932: Love, Fame, TragedyCo-curated by Nancy Ireson in 2018, it took the radical and simple idea of exploring a single watershed year when Picasso was 50 years old and created a surprising number of key paintings. The concise, month-to-month narrative of the exhibition, combined with rich archive materials, created what can be said to be Achim’s most important successful experience. It also attracted more than 520,000 people, making it the second most visited exhibition at the Tate Gallery.
Achim was born in Durham, Germany, To Günter Bolchart and Anna Maria Struck. After receiving an exchange scholarship at the University of Rome in 1990, he received a master’s degree in art history, Italian literature, psychology, and Christian archeology at the University of Bonn. In 1992, he moved to the UK to pursue a doctorate degree at the University of Essex. The thesis focused on the art and politics of Fascist Italy.
Achim started his career in public art (1999-2005) as an exhibition organizer at the Serpentine Gallery in London. After working briefly at the Barbican Museum, he joined Tate in 2005 as a curator of modern and contemporary art, and over the next four years curated several large-scale exhibitions at Tate Modern, the most famous of which is Albers And Moholy-Nagy (2006) and Rothko: The Late Series (2008), and Doris Salcedo’s technically challenging device, Shibboleth (2007), This requires professional engineers to build a 167-meter-long crack on the floor of the turbine hall.
The Rothko exhibition is the first British exhibition dedicated to the artist’s late abstract painting, aiming to capture the “extraordinary existential endeavour” that underpins Rothko’s art, as described by Achim. The highlight is that for the first time since its establishment, 16 Seagram murals (9 of them from the Tate Gallery collection and works borrowed from the United States and Japan) appeared in his last series, “Black on Gray”. The last year of life.
In 2009, Achim moved to the Whitechapel Gallery as the chief curator. Artists exhibited there include Walid Raad (2010), William Susnar (2011), Thomas Struth (2011) and Zarina Bimji (2012).
Achim returned to Tate Modern in 2012 as the director of exhibitions, and became its exhibition and project director in 2017, working with curator Frances Morris to further shape the future of the museum, especially with the opening of the museum , Its scale and ambitions have been extended in 2016.
Malevich (co-curated by Iria Candela, 2014), introduced new research on the artist’s confrontation with the Stalinist regime, and revealed his degree of influence on contemporary artists, and Robert Rauschenberg’s comprehensive survey (Co-curated by Katherine Wood), 2016) tells how the artist’s passion for collaboration includes not only painting and printmaking, but also technology, stage design and performance.
His belief in collective efforts, sympathy and sensitivity to historical and contemporary artists are his hallmarks.
Behind the scenes, he supported artists such as Olafur Eliasson, Steve McQueen and Lubaina Himid to carry out their own exhibitions, shaping experiments Performance Art Project BMW Tate live, Chair the steering group Modern Tate Research Center: Transnational, Explores the interconnected global art history, and is the director champion of the employee BAME network.
In addition to Tate, he is also a member and speaker of regular meeting groups, as well as a trustee of multiple organizations, including independent community arts organizations PEER, located in East London.
As I experienced when working with Achim at Tate, he likes to challenge artistic orthodoxy. He is charming and witty, speaks with his Rhineland-German accent, and always likes to convince you to see different points of view.
Achim’s survivors are his wife Laura Hume, who married in 1995, their children Saskia, Tom and Matti, and his sisters Claudia and Rita.
