Born in 1944 in Bautzen, Saxony, Christian Duerckheim belongs to those collectors who transform personal passion into a decades-long, unwavering commitment. He began engaging with art and acquiring works as early as the 1960s, tentatively at first, then with growing conviction. A defining moment came with his encounter with Georg Baselitz's print Gigant, which turned his attention decisively toward contemporary art and laid the foundation for a collection that would go on to focus on developments from the 1970s onward.

From that early decision grew a collection of remarkable coherence. Duerckheim never collected eclectically; instead, he pursued artistic positions with a refined instinct for work that reflects social and historical upheaval. Today, his collection is regarded as one of the most ambitious private collections of international contemporary art. At its core are key works of German and Austrian postwar art, pieces by Anselm Kiefer, Hermann Nitsch, Blinky Palermo, and Rémy Zaugg, that document an era of artistic renewal in which questions of identity, memory, and history were being debated with new urgency. At the same time, the collection has a strong international dimension. British and international positions are well represented, broadening its thematic scope considerably. Works by Jake and Dinos Chapman, Theaster Gates, Gilbert and George, Antony Gormley, Damien Hirst, and Tracey Emin exemplify an art that confronts the conditions of the present – often provocative, occasionally radical, yet always analytically sharp.

Duerckheim never saw his collection as a purely private endeavor. In 2013 and again in 2022, he donated significant holdings, particularly works on paper, to the British Museum, underscoring his ambition not merely to preserve the works but to place them within an institutional context and make them accessible to an international audience. A further milestone is his partnership with the Fundação de Serralves in Porto. Since 2024, a selection of 37 works by 19 artists has been on long-term loan there, complemented by the gift of Kiefer's monumental work Dat rosa miel apibus (2010–11), which stands as a programmatic statement of the collection's ethos. For Duerckheim, Serralves is an institution uniquely positioned, through its critical, forward-looking perspective, to embed these works in a living discourse.

The Exhibition: Vexation of Spirit

The resulting exhibition, Vexation of Spirit – The Duerckheim Collection x Serralves, on view from May through November 2026, represents the current high point of this collaboration. It is far more than a conventional collection survey. Rather, it unfolds as a conceptual proposition, bringing into focus three forces that have profoundly shaped human history: religion, society, and war.

Within this charged field, the works enter into dialogue, generating resonances, but also deliberate friction. Time and again, it becomes clear how religious narratives, social orders, and political claims to power intertwine and how readily they can be instrumentalized. The exhibition also points to the formative role of the Judeo-Christian tradition in the Western world, whose symbolism and stories have been invoked for centuries to legitimize the most varied forms of authority.

What makes the show especially striking is its urgency. When the first conceptual thinking around the collection took shape in the 1990s, many of today's most pressing conflicts still seemed distant. Three decades on, the world looks, in many respects, more fragmented, more volatile, shot through with new tensions. Against this backdrop, Vexation of Spirit takes on an unexpected immediacy: the works do not merely reflect historical developments; they read as precise commentaries on the present.

The exhibition is intended not only to offer an aesthetic experience, but to prompt reflection on the mechanisms of power, on the role of faith and ideology, on the fragility of social orders. That, ultimately, is the exhibition's strength: it offers no easy answers, but insists on the complexity of the questions.

More Information on Duerckheim Collection X Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art.