Ludwig Forum for International Art

The Ludwig Forum for International Art is a museum for modern art in Aachen. It is based on the Ludwig Collection, which was brought together by the Aachen collector couple Irene and Peter Ludwig, and is supported by the Peter and Irene Ludwig Foundation.

Since 1968, founding director Wolfgang Becker has worked closely with the Ludwig collector couple and in 1970, the municipal museum Neue Galerie - Sammlung Ludwig was founded in Aachen from common ideas. It was one of the first museums for contemporary art in Germany and was originally located in the Alte Kurhaus Aachen. Conservative hostility motivated gynaecologist Hugo Jung and five other professors at RWTH Aachen University to found the Verein der Freunde der Neuen Galerie on 9 February 1971. In 1991, the museum moved into the rooms of Emil Brauer, an umbrella factory built in 1928 in the international style and shut down in 1988, and henceforth called itself the Ludwig Forum for International Art. The Friends of the Ludwig Forum was formed from the friends' association.

Since the move, the museum has focused on contemporary art. By 2011, the number of visitors had increased to around 55,000 per year.

The Ludwig Forum's collection comprises more than 3,000 works, mainly from the collection of the collectors Peter and Irene Ludwig, from all genres of art and from many countries. The Ludwig Collection is particularly well known for its pop art collections and its focus on American art since the 1960s. In 1977, the collector couple first showed Pop Art in East Berlin. This led to a lively exchange with artists from Eastern Germany. In the 1980s and 1990s, the Ludwigs traveled to Russia and soon began collecting contemporary Soviet and Chinese art. Today, many of these positions and artist personalities are world famous, such as Ilya Kabakov, Erik Bulatov, Huang Yong Ping and Ai Weiwei. In addition, an important collection of video art was built up in the house, which today has some 200 works of art in the city.

Some of the works that the Ludwig Forum houses are not missing in any encyclopedia on modern art history and thus belong to a kind of world memory of 20th century art. These include, for example, the photorealistic painting Medici by Franz Gertsch or the sculpture group Bowery Bums by Duane Hanson, which shows three beggars of the Bowery in Manhattan. Both works were exhibited in 1972 at the now legendary documenta 5 by Harald Szeemann in Kassel. Hanson also produced the Mona-Lisa from Aachen, a hyper-realistic sculpture of a woman with a shopping trolley, affectionately known as the Supermarket Lady. Jonathan Borofsky's ballerina clown, which is set up in the courtyard of the Ludwig Forum, also looks far into history and over the continents. He has a twin in Los Angeles, set up on the roof of the Public Library of Santa Monica, directly on the Pacific Ocean. The clown was originally created for the Metropolis show, which is now regarded as the benchmark among experts. It was shown at the beginning of 1991 in the Gropius Bau in Berlin and from which the work for Aachen was acquired on the occasion of the reopening of the Ludwig Forum in the summer of the same year.

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