Petra Lange-Berndt

Petra Lange-Berndt is chair of Modern and Contemporary art in the art history department at the University of Hamburg; previously, she was lecturer / reader at the History of Art department, University College London, for eight years. She has written about animals and taxidermy (“Animal Art, Präparierte Tiere in der Kunst, 1850-2000”, Silke Schreiber, 2009), psychedelia and intermedia (Sigmar Polke: We Petty Bourgeois!: Comrades and Contemporaries, the 1970s, Walther König, 2009), questions of materiality (Documents of Contemporary Art: Materiality, Whitechapel Gallery / MIT Press, 2015) and Conceptual art (Hanne Darboven: Correspondence, 1967–1975, 10 volumes, Verlag Walther König, 2015). Her current research examines Monte Verità as central to the Lebensreform movement, as well as the concept of the commune in 1970s art.  

Petra Lange-Berndt has also curated a number of exhibitions: Sigmar Polke: Wir Kleinbürger! Zeitgenossen und Zeitgenossinnen. Die 1970er at the Hamburger Kunsthalle (2009–2010, with Dietmar Rübel and Dorothee Böhm), a show in three parts that was crowned Exhibition of the Year by the International Association of Art Critics (AICA); Mark Dion: Die Akademie der Dinge at the Akademie der Künste, the Albertinum and the Grünes Gewölbe, Dresden (2014–2015, with Dietmar Rübel, catalogue published by Walther König); Hanne Darboven: Korrespondenzen at Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2017, with Gabriele Knapstein and Dietmar Rübel) as well as Singular / Plural: Kollaborationen in der Post-Pop-Polit-Arena at Kunsthalle Düsseldorf (2017, with Max Schulze, Dietmar Rübel).

She received the 2020 Hamburger Lehrpreis award for her exhibition „Werden, das ist die Losung!“ Szenen zum 150. Geburtstag von Ernst Barlach, curated together with students at Barlach Haus, Hamburg.