Kontakt. The Art Collection
of Erste Bank Group

Kontakt – The Art Collection of Erste Bank Group explores art production in Central, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe with a special emphasis on contemporary art discourses and critical theory. Kontakt reflects the political transformation in Europe and the significance of art before the background of specific cultural, social and economic developments in the post-socialist countries. Its aim is to develop a collection with a sound art-historical and conceptual basis that deals with artistic positions rooted in a specific location and context that has long been neglected by many museums despite this art’s international credentials. This endeavor entails a shifting within the existing canon of the most recent art history and opens new opportunities for the positioning of artistic activity.

The point of departure for Kontakt is to be found in the conceptual tendencies and key artistic movements of the 1960s and 70s. This historically oriented section begins with a number of works that see themselves as reactions to modernism and its status within the art discourse of the present. Reflections on the developments in Eastern and South-Eastern Europe serve as the point of departure for assembling a solid collection of artworks in a variety of media and formats. The main body of the collection focuses on works dating from the most recent art history.

Since 2004, the collecting policy and choice of artworks has been carried out by an independent art advisory committee with the following members: Silvia Eiblmayr (director of Galerie im Taxispalais, Innsbruck), Georg Schöllhammer (editor of springerin – Hefte für Gegenwartskunst and the publications for documenta 12), Jiří Ševčík (professor, Academy of Fine Arts, Prague), Branka Stipančić (independent curator, Zagreb) and Adam Szymczyk (director, Kunsthalle Basel).

The Art Collection of Erste Bank Group sees itself as a process-oriented structure that reacts to developments within contemporary art. Its collecting activities go beyond the piece-by-piece purchase of artworks, and the possibilities for its representation are just as multifarious. In addition to perpetual acquisition, the collection’s structure offers a flexible working platform that is in continual contact with current art production.

Thus the presentation of the artworks remains decentralized and relational and is independent of an institutional or locally anchored exhibition space. Exhibitions take place in the form of curated projects in cooperation with museum institutions and exhibition centres and also in collaboration with the artists themselves. One of the project’s aims is to exhibit the entire collection or selected parts of it in a local context which provides the frame of reference for the artworks.


www.kontakt-collection.net