It is announced today that Christoph Grunenberg, Director of Tate Liverpool, has been appointed Director of the Kunsthalle Bremen in Germany.
Christoph leaves Tate after a decade as Director of Tate Liverpool. He has made a critical contribution to the cultural regeneration of Liverpool and the city’s extraordinarily successful year as European Capital Culture of Culture in 2008 in which Tate Liverpool attracted over one million visitors. In that remarkable year he also co-curated the exhibition Gustav Klimt: Painting, Design and Modern Life in Vienna 1900 which remains Tate Liverpool’s most popular exhibition to date. He created a highly distinctive and memorable exhibition programme, frequently touring to or developed in collaboration with major European and American galleries. He took an active role in curating exhibitions which have included Shopping: A Century of Art and Consumer Culture; Summer of Love: Art of the Psychedelic Era; Picasso: Peace and Freedom and the current exhibition René Magritte: The Pleasure Principle.
In 2007, Christoph chaired the Turner Prize jury, the first time in its history that the exhibition and award ceremony were held outside London. As Director, Christoph has promoted new approaches to the display of the Tate Collection, collaborating with people in the creative industry from a wide variety of disciplines. He has made Tate Liverpool an exciting destination for visitors from the North West region and beyond, and with an average of 600,000 visitors annually, one of the most successful galleries of modern and contemporary art in the world. We shall miss him but are delighted that he has been appointed to a prestigious role in his home country.