Three new appointments at Kunstmuseum Basel

The Kunstmuseum Basel has made appointments for three positions: Daniel Kurjaković is the new curator of programs, Anita Haldemann will head the Kupferstichkabinett (Department of Prints and Drawings), and Ariane Mensger becomes curator in the Kupferstichkabinett. 

In May 2017, Daniel Kurjaković will join the Kunstmuseum Basel’s team in the newly created position of “curator of programs.” An art historian and curator by training, Kurjaković has worked in the art field in various capacities for over twenty years. 

He was born in Olten, Switzerland, in 1970 and currently lives in Paris. He studied art history, Slavic languages, and philosophy at the University of Zurich. Thanks to a career that took him to a variety of institutions around the world, Daniel Kurjaković has a wide network of contacts in Europe, Asia, and the United States as well as extensive experience in cooperating with institutions and a global perspective, key qualifications for his new position. 

On May 1, Dr. Anita Haldemann will take office as head of the Kupferstichkabinett at the Kunstmuseum Basel, the position formerly held by Christian Müller, who retired in 2015. The Kunstmuseum’s former director, Bernhard Mendes Bürgi, had left this decision to his successor. 

Anita Haldemann has been acting head of the Kupferstichkabinett since Müller’s departure. After starting her career in museum work at the Kunstmuseum Bern and the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., she joined the Kunstmuseum Basel as a curator in 2002. Since then, she has curated over twenty exhibitions and numerous cabinet presentations of graphic art from the nineteenth century to the present, including internationally acclaimed retrospectives of the drawings of Rosemarie Trockel and Markus Raetz as well as projects showcasing emerging artists such as Michaël Borremans and, most recently, Catharina van Eetvelde. One central focus of her work with the collection has been on exhibitions of nineteenth-century and classic modernist art. She is currently preparing an exhibition of Cézanne’s sketchbooks as well as a new series of presentations of works from the collection. 

Same day, Dr. Ariane Mensger will succeed Anita Haldemann as curator in the Kupferstichkabinett; her particular responsibility will be the art of the Old Masters, where she succeeds Christian Müller. She has been acting curator since 2015, preparing the exhibition The Enterprise of Hendrick Goltzius, which was on view in the fall of 2016. Her next exhibition, Womanhood—Eros, Power, Morality, and Death around 1500 will open in October 2017. 

In 2000, Ariane Mensger obtained a doctorate from the University of Heidelberg, where Prof. Hans Belting was her advisor. Her research has focused on German and Dutch art of the early modern period. She worked at Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe and other institutions; most recently, she was curator at Kunsthalle München. She has also led a number of research and exhibition projects on the art of the copy and other subjects.