New Director of the Stadtgalerie

Katharina Ritter, who grew up in Saarland, shapes the Stadtgalerie as a place of critical confidence. She encourages diverse collaborations and long-term participation of different social groups and promotes exchange with cultural practitioners:

"I connect local issues with global developments. Exhibiting art is just as important to me as working together for a better future. The urgent issues of our time are a common challenge that require connecting different competences."

New ideas in the interim period - new exhibitions and a digital opening in February

During the interim period, Katharina Ritter not only continued the programme, but also set new impulses within a very short time in order to keep the Stadtgalerie in public discussion during the Corona pandemic. On Friday, 19 February, the opening of her first three exhibitions took place digitally.

With Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Ritter is showing an artist whose works in the Stadtgalerie link directly to the exhibition in the German Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2019. The works trace the complex interconnections and interpenetration of technology, biology and value systems.

With Florian Huth and Joni Majer, Ritter is exhibiting two artists with a personal connection to Saarland: Florian Huth (*1980 in Saarbrücken) explores artistic ability and success. The illustrator Joni Majer (* 1985 in Berlin) lives and works in Saarbrücken. In her drawings, she expresses complicated things as simply and clearly as possible, in black and white. During Lockdown, she transferred her visual world into a new dimension and modelled her "sign for face" in clay.

Out of the Stadtgalerie, Katharina Ritter initiates other artistic projects in the urban space, such as the design of a mural by Joni Majer outside the city centre. She promotes exchange with creatives and cultural workers in a transdisciplinary and transcultural context. Katharina Ritter connects the City Gallery with various institutions in the city and also focuses on cooperation with economy and science.

In a public competition with a total of 20 candidates, Katharina Ritter succeeded. She followed Dr Andrea Jahn, who moved to the Saarland Cultural Heritage Foundation.

Previous stations

Katharina Ritter, born in 1982, developed a model project for community diversity as the artistic director of the Künstlerhäuser Worpswede e.V. before becoming interim director of the Stadtgalerie Saarbrücken. At its core, the project is about the future sustainability of the institution in connection with the rural region.

From 2017 to 2019, as exhibition director of the Kunstverein Ulm e.V., she showed contemporary artists such as Tom Anholt, Mert Akbal, Lotte Günther, Hojin Kang and Naomi Liesenfeld and developed an extensive mediation programme.

Since 2013, she has been a lecturer at the Hochschule der Bildenden Künste Saar, teaching art history and art theory. Ritter is a founding member and was chairwoman of the Neuer Saarbrücker Kunstverein e.V.

As a research assistant at the Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations, Katharina Ritter supervised the touring exhibition project "Weltreise. Art from Germany on the Road. Works from the ifa's art collection 1949 - today" with around 350 works of art by artists including Joseph Beuys, Isa Genzken, Rebecca Horn and many more.

She was already a research assistant at the Stadtgalerie Saarbrücken from 2012 to 2014, and from 2008 to 2012 she was part of the gallery staff at the Hochschule der Bildenden Künste Saar.