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The collection is supported and marked out by two temporal cornerstones; 1968 and 1989. It is on the one hand the political events of these two years that exert their effect on this extraordinary collection and thus lend it an unmistakeable political profile. But it is above all the choice of the work that reflects these periods of European new departures on the levels of the idea and intellectual history in an entirely unique manner.
The artists for whom Annick and Anton Herbert have shown and continue to show such a committed interest, have each been involved in a radical new orientation in their work as they have participated in the charging of art with critical consciousness. The Herbert Collection thus unites work that has in its time had a path-beating function by artists such as Marcel Broodthaers, Carl Andre, Hanne Darboven, On Kawara, Mario Merz or Gerhard Richter and also on the basis of work by Martin Kippenberger, Mario Merz, Mike Kelley, Thomas Schütte or Franz West which shows a development through a period of two generations and within three decades.
The cooperation between pioneering artists, the collectors, personalities from the museum world and other selected gallerists has been a determining constant of the Herbert Collection since the 1970’s. By this means the all-changing objectives of concept art are dealt out in a form of role distribution on a basis of equality: Being a part of this thrust was more important than possessing the works themselves according to Anton Herbert. Seen from this perspective, collecting becomes a structure of relationships to a specific path and a participation in a social network.
