The search committee for the new director of the Kunstmuseen Krefeld has nominated Katia Baudin, deputy director of the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, as the successor to Dr. Martin Hentschel. Hentschel, who has served as director of the Kunstmuseen Krefeld since 2001, will retire on August 31, 2016.

The search committee unanimously selected Baudin from among some 40 applications. The prestigious committee chaired by Mayor Gregor Kathstede included Professor Pia Fries, Akademie der Bildenden Künste München; Max Hollein, director of the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt; Beat Wismer, general director of the Museum Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf; Dr. Yilmaz Dziewior, director of the Museum Ludwig in Cologne; as well as Dr. Magdalena Broska, Adolf-Luther-Stiftung Krefeld; Gregor Micus, director of cultural affairs for the city of Krefeld; and Beate Zielke, city manager for Krefeld.

Baudin appeared on Tuesday, September 15, at the joint meeting of the administrative and cultural committee at the Museum Burg Linn. The administrative committee, which is responsible for personnel decisions, voted in favor of the search committee’s recommendation, after which an emergency decision for the main committee was made.

Katia Baudin was born in 1967 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France, and grew up in New York. She studied both business administration and art history (BBA, Hofstra University, New York; master’s in art history, Université de Sorbonne Paris IV), and has worked in both fields. She brings 18 years of leadership experience to the Kunstmuseen Krefeld, which she gained at important international art institutions. In France Baudin led the contemporary art and design museum Frac Nord-Pas de Calais (Fonds régional d’art contemporain) in Dunkirk from 1997 to 2004, after which she served as rector of the Ecole supérieure des arts décoratifs in Strasbourg from 2004 to 2007. Since 2008 she has worked as deputy director of the Museum Ludwig, and she served as acting director of the museum in 2014.

Baudin’s academic focus includes interdisciplinary questions, border issues between fine art and applied art, questions relating to identity and the social role of the arts; she also examines positions that deal with site and context.

She has curated over 40 exhibitions on modern and contemporary art and design, including Tobias Rehberger (2000), Miriam Bäckström (2001), Bik van der Pol (2002), Traffic d’influences: Art et Design (2004), Michel Mallard: Art Director’s Cut (fashion photography, 2005), Chris Kabel & Wieki Somers (2006), Leni Hoffmann (2009), Franz West (2009), the on the Russian avant-garde projectseries at the Museum Ludwig (since 2009), Cosima von Bonin (2011), and most recently the Pierre Huyghe retrospective, which was awarded exhibition of the year 2014 by the German section of AICA. In 2010 she was director of the European Triennial of Small Sculpture in Murska Sobota, Slovenia. In the same year, she was invited by the Porzellanikon in Selb to curate Utopias of the Everyday, in which she brought artists and designers together with porcelain manufacturers Kahla and Nymphenburg in order to realize experimental projects in porcelain. In April 2016 her last exhibition for the Museum Ludwig will open, Fernand Léger: Painting in Space, on the great modernist painter’s involvement with architecture, theater, and public space.

“With Katia Baudin we have gained an extremely well-versed, internationally connected art expert and leader for the Kunstmuseen Krefeld. I am delighted with this decision and am confident that Ms. Baudin will carry on and enrich the avant-garde tradition of our art museums with her own bold impetuses and ideas over the coming years,” said Mayor Gregor Kathstede.

Baudin stated that she is particularly looking forward to taking on her new position: “The Kunstmuseen Krefeld, with their exciting constellation of three institutions—the Kaiser Wilhelm Museum, which was originally planned for the applied arts, and the two villas designed by Mies van der Rohe, Haus Lange and Haus Esters—have played a key role in art history with pioneering exhibitions that today have an important position in international art history. Their prestigious collections of modern and contemporary art as well as older and applied art also offer many different perspectives. I am delighted to continue this experimental tradition both in fine art and applied art and to place it in the context of art and cultural history. Especially in Krefeld, the city where the museum and industry engaged in a constant dialogue 100 years ago in order to bring art into everyday life, this positioning seems particularly significant to me. I am looking forward to many lively dialogues between the past and the present, between fine art and applied art, between public and private space, between the museum and the public.”

Yilmaz Dziewior, director of the Museum Ludwig, congratulated his colleague Katia Baudin with great enthusiasm on her new position: “Though our congratulations are also mixed with melancholy, since we are sad to see her leave, this is the right moment after seven successful years as deputy director of the Museum Ludwig, and her new role as director of the historically important institutions in Krefeld is a more than convincing argument for a change. There is still almost one year ahead before she takes on her new position in Krefeld in September 2016, during which we will not only carefully choose her successor at the Museum Ludwig, but will also open the promising exhibition Fernand Léger: Painting in Space curated by Katia Baudin this coming spring.”