Erling Kagge is the 2020 guest curator at Museion

Erling Kagge is the guest curator at Museion for 2020. Kagge (b. Oslo, 1963) is an explorer, lawyer, art collector, entrepreneur, politician, author and publisher. Described as a modern hero capable of going beyond the limits of human exploration (Time) Kagge is famous for his numerous extreme enterprises. He was the first person to complete the “Three Poles Challenge” (in addition to scaling Everest in the 1990s he was the first person to reach the North Pole unsupported and the first to reach the South Pole alone and on foot). He has also expressed the spirit of adventure intrinsic to his nature in urban exploration projects, including descending into the sewage, subway and water tunnels of New York and walking for five days from the Bronx, via Manhattan to the Atlantic Ocean. A genuine Renaissance Man, Kagge has also written a number of books that are translated into several languages (“Walking: One Step at a time” published by Viking in 2019 and “Silence. In the Age of Noise”, published by Penguin in 2018).
But Erling Kagge is, above all, a passionate collector of contemporary art works that he says he collects with his usual spirit of exploration. A selection of works from his collection that features a variety of media including photographs, paintings, sculptures and videos will be presented for the first time ever in Italy at Museion in Bolzano in an exhibition that opens in September 2020. The exhibition will be curated by Erling Kagge, in collaboration with Museion. In fact, one of his books is a guide for aspiring art collectors, entitled “A Poor Collector’s Guide to Buying Great Art”, in which he explains how to collect contemporary art without spending a fortune. Letizia Ragaglia, Museion director: “With Erling Kagge, Museion has widened its guest curator profile by offering this role to a passionate collector, who has built a comprehensive collection with care and dedication. The same spirit that has distinguished the Museion programme in recent years blows through his collection too. That is to say, a belief in the experimental talents of many young artists in the international contemporary art scene.”

Museion’s guest curator Erling Kagge will be the seventh guest curator at Museion. This formula involves a guest curator being invited every year to present a themed exhibition at the museum. Since 2012, the role has been entrusted to Rein Wolfs, now director of the Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle in the Federal Republic of Germany, Carol Yinghua Lu, an independent curator with the artist Liu Ding, Pierre Bal-Blanc a member of the Documenta 14 team of curators, and former director of the Bretigny Contemporary Art Center in Greater Paris, France (2003-2015) the artist Francesco Vezzoli (2016), the photographer artist Nicolò Degiorgis (2017), the critic and curator Veit Loers (2018) and the author and curator Ilse Lafer (2019).