Klaus Biesenbach leaves Los Angeles museum for post in Berlin



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The status of the five directors who joined the board under Biesenbach in 2018, namely Dr Adrian Cheng, Marina Kellen French, Simon Mordant, Sean Parker and Julia Stoschek, is also unclear.

French, in particular, is a close friend of Biesenbach’s and may well leave the board with her departure, not least because she is primarily tied to New York, where she sits on the board of directors of the Metropolitan Opera, the Metropolitan. Museum of Art and Carnegie Hall. . Her departure would be a loss for the MOCA board, given French’s financial capabilities: earlier this year she staffed the Met Museum as director, and Max Hollein is now known as Marina’s French director. Kellen.

MOCA has seemed like a revolving door of directors, going from Jeremy Strick to Jeffrey Deitch to Philippe Vergne in Biesenbach. There were also the very public stormy departures of Chief Conservatives Paul Schimmel and Helen Molesworth. And the museum has resisted a raid on its endowment to pay the bills and a proposed merger with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

“I’m not entirely surprised that it’s been so fleeting – it seems to be very difficult there,” said Kristy Edmunds, executive and artistic director of the Center for the Art of Performance at UCLA. “Now let’s put MOCA in a full support position for Johanna to carry the baton.”

The day before Biesenbach’s departure was announced, he was on hand to announce the opening of a new exhibition by Pipilotti Rist, a Swiss videographer, at Geffen Contemporary, the MOCA warehouse in downtown Los Angeles. It was a flagship exhibition that had been in the works for almost three years and Biesenbach, along with Rist, led the press conference before opening the doors to the maze of the warehouse of his videos. He gave no indication that this would be his last public moment with MOCA or of Berlin’s impending announcement.

Born in Germany, Biesenbach, 55, arrived in Los Angeles after having been director of MoMA PS1 since 2009. He was appointed curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2006. And, at 25, he was one of the founders of the Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin, where he began his career in museums.

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