Current exhibition
Multiple Choice. The MAT Collection (Multiplication of transformable art) on the 100th birthday of Peter Ludwig
08.07.2025 – 31.10.2025
Exhibition flyer here
Peter Ludwig (*9 July 1925 in Koblenz; † 22 July 1996 in Aachen) acquired the Edition MAT in the early 1990s and initially gave it to the Ludwig Museum as a permanent loan in 1992. This significant collection of contemporary works, with a particular focus on French, German, and Italian artists, represents a rarely exhibited ensemble of works from the Edition MAT (“Multiplication d’Art transformable,” in English, “Multiplication of Transformable Art”) and comprises 26 objects. This unwieldy term conceals an innovative and complex concept, initially focused on works of art that were intended to be transformable and mobile.
The Romanian-Swiss artist Daniel Spoerri (1930-2024) conceived the idea in the 1950s. Renowned artists, including Marcel Duchamp, Christo, Jean Arp, Arman, Roy Lichtenstein, Davide Boriani, Niki de Saint Phalle, Daniel Spoerri, and Jean Tinguely, participated in the MAT edition.
Edition MAT emerged in the context of fundamental efforts in the 1960s to democratize culture and make works of art “suitable for everyday use” and universally “available.” Multiplication, in this sense, meant not only the idea of multiples—the mass production of identical objects—but also the introduction of variations through the optical, mechanical, or physical participation of the viewer. To the extent that the viewer himself became the creator of the artwork, the artist’s gesture also faded into the background. In Spoerri’s concept, movement, change, reproduction, and dehierarchization were inextricably linked. The Edition MAT project was in line with the fundamental efforts of the 1960s to democratize culture.
On July 9, 2025, Peter Ludwig, the renowned Koblenz art collector and founder of the Ludwig Museum Koblenz, would have turned 100 years old. With his wife Irene (née Monheim), he established a renowned foundation and is the namesake of a total of thirteen museums and institutions that are firmly established in the national and international museum landscape. The exhibition at the Ludwig Museum is complemented by significant loans of MAT objects from the collection of the Cologne gallery Der Spiegel. The MAT edition reflects in a unique way Peter Ludwig’s interest in a wide variety of art genres, innovative concepts, and his openness to the playful and experimental.
Plakat der Ausstellung MAT