Kunsthalle Zurich has hired Swiss curator Daniel Baumann as director. Baumann has been the curator of the Adolf Wölfli Foundation, located at the Museum of Fine Arts Bern, Switzerland, since 1996. Baumann succeeds Beatrix Ruf, who in April accepted the directorship of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.
Baumann was one of the co-curators of the most recent Carnegie International, at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum of Art. Linda Mai Green, writing for A.i.A., described the show as “offering a refreshing dose of self-awareness and reflection on the museum as a locus for civic engagement.”
Baumann also co-founded Basel exhibition space New Jerseyy in 2008. Aimee Walleston described New Jerseyy’s exhibitions, which include pizza dinners and movie screenings, as “so casually deconstructive of the formalities of gallery-going and art fairs that they might be interpreted as a chilled out, non-didactic model of Relational Aesthetics.”
Between 2003 and 2010 Baumann directed Kunsttangente, a public art project in Basel, Switzerland; in 2004 he established an ongoing exhibition series in Tbilisi, Georgia.
Baumann starts part-time at the Kunsthalle in November and goes full-time on Jan. 1, 2015.