The Falckenberg Collection comprises more than 2200 works by 450 artists. Its focus is the art of the counterculture, which emerged after the Second World War as an uprising against the elites and the art establishment particularly in the United States and Germany. The collection has won several international awards and was voted among the top 200 collections in the world by the influential New York magazine ARTnews. It emphasizes unconventional thinkers and outsiders of the art world whose subversive, often ironic and even sarcastic or cynical views run counter to traditional notions of the good, the true, and the beautiful in representative art.
From early on, the collection has focused on works from the late 1970s and ’80s with artists such as Werner Büttner, Martin Kippenberger, Jürgen Klauke, Astrid Klein, Albert Oehlen, and Franz West, which are juxtaposed with works by American artists from the same generation such as Vito Acconci, John Baldessari, Paul McCarthy, and Richard Prince. Moving back in time, these positions have been augmented with works by the previous generation of progressive international artists such as Hanne Darboven, Öyvind Fahlström, Dieter Roth, and Paul Thek. A third area of the collection includes more recent positions of contemporary art.
With works by Monica Bonvicini, Andrea Fraser, Christian Jankowski, Sarah Lucas, Raymond Pettibon, Jason Rhoades, Daniel Richter, Christoph Schlingensief, Santiago Sierra, and Andreas Slominski, the collection offers a profound overview of German and international representatives of the counterculture of the 1980s and ’90s.
An important part of the 6000-square-meter exhibition space is dedicated to large-scale installations of multimedia art by artists such as John Bock, Thomas Hirschhorn, Mike Kelley, Jon Kessler, Jonathan Meese, Anna Oppermann, and Gregor Schneider. The basement level features a storage facility with some 400 works on sliding shelves.
Another focus of the collection is on photography with works by international artists such as Lewis Baltz, Victor Burgin, Sophie Calle, Larry Clark, Willliam Eggleston, Valie Export, Lee Friedlander, Martha Rosler, Martin Parr, and Wolfgang Tillmans.
Every year, two to three special exhibitions take place with works by artists who are not represented in the Falckenberg Collection, or from whom the collection only includes a few works. The Deichtorhallen Hamburg aims to continually present the collection in different contexts.