From the main hall leads a newly built bridge across to the warehouse annex called the Rieckhalle, newly renovated especially for the collection and where the rest of the collection (an estimated 2500 works) will be displayed in rotation after January 2005.

It is an enormous building that is perhaps 20 meters wide and seemingly endless in length. Comprising of five halls at ground level and three in the basement, it has a very raw feeling to it, with bare bricks painted white, naked beams and rough concrete floors.

Rodney Graham “School of Velocity”

Compared to the main hall, here the artworks – including Rodney Graham’s expansive “School of Velocity” which I love for its obsessive logic; a great number of paintings and sculptures by Martin Kippenberger; the huge, ongoing installation “Gartenskulptur” by Dieter Roth; photographic or video works by Thomas Struth, Isa Genzken/Wolfgang Tillmans, and Diana Thater; and almost a hundred small format paintings by Jean-Frederic Schnyder lining the long corridor of the hall – feel fresh, crucial, even rebellious.

Downstairs in the basement, one room is again dedicated to Bruce Nauman, another to Pipilotti Rist, and a third to Luc Tuymans, Wolfgang Tillmans and Thomas Ruff, whose photographic series of the interior of ordinary homes seemed to warm the entire hall with its humanity. Though I found the contents of the main hall to be overall more interesting, the space created in the Rieckhalle is much edgier, much more contemporary, and I look forward to coming back in the future when the collection has renewed itself, to see how other works will fill the space.

Dan Graham

Flick has, for better or worse, collected works from a single artist intensively, and the 400 or so pieces displayed here could be split up into a number of comprehensive retrospectives – Bruce Nauman, Paul McCarthy, or Luc Tuymans, to suggest a few. It is an exciting and extremely entertaining collection and deserves to be seen, though it would be naive and wrong to think that it could be separated from its historical and political significance.

Furthermore, the fact that so many works of such importance can belong to one man is somewhat disturbing, not only for the artists themselves or art in general (especially in light of the recent warehouse fire of Saatchi) but even for society as a whole in terms of wealth distribution and power (when one man has more purchasing power – or simply power in any sense – than a city, one has to worry a little).

The collection is on loan to Berlin – a very poor city with no permanent collection of contemporary art – for seven years, during which the value of the pieces are likely to rise, and after which Friedrich Christian Flick can withdraw the entire collection at his own will. This long running exhibition could put Berlin firmly on the world map of contemporary art, but it may also leave it hanging high and dry.

Christian Friedrich Flick Collection
Date: September 22nd, 2004 – January 23rd, 2005
Place: Hamburger Bahnhof
Address: 50-51 Invalidenstraße, 10557 Berlin
Tel: +49 30 26642 4242
http://www.hamburgerbahnhof.de