Collection

The collection of the Migros-Genossenschafts-Bund was brought into being in 1957 with the establishment of the Migros and the Migros-Kulturprozent statutes. They formed the dynamic driving force leading to the founding of the museum in 1996. Initially, Migros founder Gottlieb Duttweiler and his advisors collected local and national art. After Gottlieb Duttweiler’s death Migros decided in the mid-1970s to professionalise the collection and to steer it toward international contemporary art.

Today the collection has a core inventory of around 500 works. While acquisition in the 1970s concentrated on Minimal Art, German painting and important Swiss positions, the focus in the last two decades has been on contemporary art (e.g. Maurizio Cattelan, Spartacus Chetwynd, Christoph Büchel, Urs Fischer, Douglas Gordon, Rachel Harrison, Mark Leckey, Henrik Olesen, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Tatiana Trouvé, Christoph Schlingensief, Cathy Wilkes, amongst others) and their important predecessors (e.g. Marc Camille Chaimowicz, Gustav Metzger, Stephen Willats, Katharina Sieverding, Paul Thek etc.). Installative works as well as works involved with spatial construction, performativity and socio-political questions take a particularly significant role here. The most recent acquisitions for the collection have to the most part arisen from production works for exhibitions. In this way various larger installative works could be acquired and the exhibition activities linked to the collection activities.

In the course of time the responsibility for collection activities was incumbent on various protagonists: Urs Raussmüller (1978–1985), Jacqueline Burckhardt (1986–1990) and Rein Wolfs (1991–2001), who was able to found the museum in 1996. Since 2002 Heike Munder has been the director of the museum and thus also responsible for its acquisitions. The works are displayed in temporary exhibitions or together in other contemporary art positions. In this way the visitors experience the collection in a context of art production of the present and continually discover their numerous facets anew.

The collection work in the museum always incorporates a view into the future as well as one into the past. The purpose is to formulate history, constantly in the knowledge of its constructedness but with the possibility to vary or reformulate it.