On 29 November, Peter Weiermair passed away in Innsbruck. Art historian, critic and curator, Weiermair was obsessed with art in all its forms and was a great lover of Italian art.
After having long been director of the Kunstverein in Frankfurt and then of the Rupertinum in Salzburg, he was director of the Galleria d’arte moderna in Bologna from 2001 to 2007. As a director who came ‘from outside’, he wanted to move beyond national alignments and logics, by giving a lot of space to artists and phenomena that he considered undervalued. He was particularly fond of drawing and photography, often also in an erotic key.
He was a tireless traveller (‘travelling is my elixir of life’) and a frequent visitor to the studios of well-known and lesser-known artists, galleries and museums all over the world. His motto was ‘No day goes by without looking at at least one work of art’.
To those who, in the last years of his career, judged him to be too conservative, it should be remembered that it was he who, as director of the Taxis gallery in Innsbruck, introduced international conceptual art to Austria in the late 1960s. He always considered the Austrian conceptual artist Heinz Gappmayr to be his teacher. ‘My university was Gappmayr,’ he used to say. It is true that at a certain point in his career he began to resent what he saw as the dictates of the ‘Zeitgeist’.
From the mid-1990s until 2006, he contributed to the development of Museion, Bolzano’s museum of modern and contemporary art, with his work on the scientific council and as a member of the provincial commission for art acquisitions. In those years there were several occasions for cooperation between Museion and the museums he directed: among others, the 1996 Gerhard Richter exhibition, curated with Pier Luigi Siena, “Stragegies. Photography of the 1990s from the Fondazione Sandretto Collection”, and the Raymond Pettibon exhibition in 2003, curated with the latter and presented in Bolzano and Bologna.
