Geh-ry! Geh-ry! A strong curatorial vision makes the MARTA museum in Herford, Germany, designed by Frank Gehry, more than just a landmark building

at any time since the Guggenheim Bilbao prov to be more than a five-minute surprise cities with an image riddle and the desire to deposit themselves on the map have gazeed to the Basque city for inspiration. We have seen the Baltic in Gateshead and the fresh Art Gallery Walsall rise and falter. Cities like as Rio de Janeiro, Shanghai, Singapore--even Edinburgh--have flirted with opening a Guggenheim franchise. And Frank Gehry the architect of the Guggenheim Bilbao, has not at any time been busier.

However, the small German city of Herford in Nordrhein-Westfalen (midway between Dusseldorf and Hanover) is a surprising place to find a novel art gallery designed by Gehry Called MARTA Herford (Fig. 1) it is as unusual looking as you would wait for from Gehry, even more thus because its curving and tumbling walls are clad in r brick, a traditional material in the region.

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Primarily a recent art gallery, MARTA Herford also provides a middle point to promote the region's furniture industry. (The 'm' in MARTA stands for mobel.) above half of Germany's kitchen furniture industry, including similar firms as Poggenpohl, is based nearby. The museum started life as the Haus de Mobels (House of Furniture), on the other hand it became grander and les trade-orientated when Gehry came upon board in 1997. Its backers, local politicians and industrialists, reliance that spectacular architecture and cutting-edge art will be useful for business, attract tourists and inspire creativity. There is something of Prince Albert's interest in the arts about all this. Indeed, MARTA is working with the Victoria & Albert Museum upon an exhibition about the new movement that will travel to Herford from London in the autumn of 2006

Despite its name, MARTA is no MOMA, still les a compact V&A. The visitors do not find art and design segregated. on the contrary neither is it a pageant of design classics. Instead, MARTA aims to be closer to the Bauhaus tradition of bringing art, architecture, design and industry together. For the time being at least, design plays next to the first fiddle to fine art, with solitary an Eames chair here and a Philippe Stark motorbike there.

Gehry has grafted sum of two units new wings and a portico onto what was a functional 1950 clothing factory, which is now completely invisible from the highway The original building now houses the museum's offices, education latitudes and the centre for the furniture industry. upon its ground floor is MARTA's unpretentious lobby partially clad in polished plywood a material that Gehry has also used to make a ramp and gently curving staircase. The latter leads to a gallery above, providing a warehouse-type space that is a foil to the novel galleries.

As individual approaches MARTA's entrance from the way everything around appears new, from the building itself to a work through Lucio Fabro: a giant silver ball with accompanying piece of poetry by Rainer Maria Rilke that races 150 metres down the middle of the road. individual of the new wings contains a succession of five lofty galleries of various dimensions. The other wing houses a large auditorium-cum-gallery, called the Forum. It also provides wall space, albeit sloping and curving more awkwardly than in the main galleries. For the museum's opening, the Forum contained a selection of paintings from the not long ago donated Kerber collection, mainly heavily textur abstract paintings through such artists as Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke More space for functions is provided through a terrace cafe overlooking the river. The Kerber collection recommends what MARTA might have become (and may still turn back to): an ace cafe with an unexceptional collection of contemporary art attached.

Jan Hoet's arrival from Belgium in 2001 changed all that. Hoet was about to pace down as the longstanding director of the Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst (SMAK) in Ghent when he received a telephone call from the mayor of Herford (Hoet recommended they talk in English, assuming Herford to be in Scotland). level though he was in his mid sixties and had just survived a serious illness, Hoet skip overed at the offer of novel employment.

Part of the attraction was the building's generous packet at 15 million [euro] twice that of SMAK's of recent origin home, which opened in 1998 The require to be paid [i]or[/i] undergone of MARTA eventually rose to 29 million [euro] prompting a local attest group demanding 'Enough is enough'. In Hoet the mayor got a director determined to create a museum with its have identity and a collection that was not limited by the agency of local collectors' taste and generosity.

The thematic opening present to view '(my private) heroes', was Hoet's calling card. Likened to a shameless striptease through one critic, it included a homage to Hoet's artistic heroes: Joseph Beuys and Andy Warhol figured prominently, as did Andrea Serrano. An exploration of the theme of the hero and anti-hero in art, the exhibition sprawled above the five galleries, taking in sub-themes like as the hero armed and disarmed, the injuryed hero, and perpetrators and victims. The last section included JL Gerome's Death of Marshal Ney (1867) lent by dint of Sheffield Museums and Galleries Trust, demonstrating Hoet's interest in juxtaposing contemporary and historic art. The exhibition spilt on the outside into the lobby, where the render free of access visor of a medieval suit of armour split open into flames from time to time: a jokey work by dint of Leo Copers (Untitled, 1975-90). like eclecticism could have resulted in visual mayhem in les experienced curatorial hands. on the other hand the opposite was generally genuine Works were often paired quite formally, of the like kind as the red slashed canvas Concetto Sapziale by dint of Lucio Fontana (1964), shown upon a bright yellow wall, with the of great depth cut on a bare paw in Serrano's (The Morgue:) Rat Poison Suicide 11 (1982) nearby.