Klaus Biesenbach has been named the new director of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. The German curator will leave his roles as director of MoMA PS1 in New York and chief curator at large of the Museum of Modern Art to replace Philippe Vergne at the west coast institution in March 2019.
Biesenbach will join an institution that has been hit with some scandal. In March, Vergne sacked Helen Molesworth, the museum’s chief curator, with little explanation given by the museum as to the reasons for her termination, a decision heavily criticised at the time. Vergne himself was supposed to be a stabilising appointment after the controversial tenure of Jeffrey Deitch who left in 2013.
Biesenbach’s work in New York has balanced cult, influential figures with hip relative newbies. In 2017 he oversaw exhibitions for Carolee Schneemann, Cathy Wilkes and Naeem Mohaiemen alongside shows by Tomáš Rafa and Ian Cheng, a programme run that did some way to repair the curator’s reputation after his heavily panned 2015 Björk show at MoMA.
Biesenbach joined PS1 as a curator in 1995 having previously served as the the founding director of the Kunst-Werke (KW) Institute of Contemporary Art in Berlin.
1 August 2018
