Daniel Baumann
is the Director of the Kunsthalle Zurich. He was the curator of the Adolf Wölfli Foundation from 1996 to 2014 and was one of the co-curators of the 2013 Carnegie International, which features works by thirty-five artists, among them Guo Fengyi and Joseph Yoakum.
Rethinking (Art) History (without Reaching a Conclusion)
By Daniel BaumannIt is not a coincidence if Adolf Wölfli’s work ended up at the Kunstmuseum Bern.[i] In that city, you could find a community—curator Harald Szeemann; curator of the Paul Klee Foundation Jürgen Glaesemer; art historian Elka Spoerri and her husband the psychiatrist and professor Theodor Spoerri; artists like Bernhard Luginbühl, Meret Oppenheim, and Markus Raetz; art dealer Toni Gerber—convinced that Wölfli’s oeuvre, and not just his, had to be considered art and should therefore be housed in an art museum.
