News — Jan 16, 2025

Melanie Bühler will join the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam as Curator of Contemporary Art, per April 2025. In this role, she will develop exhibitions, projects and publications and ensure the scientific accessibility of the collection. Bühler succeeds Karen Archey, who will be leading the curatorial team at Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf.

Swiss born Melanie Bühler (1983) studied art history in Zurich and New York. Prior to her five year tenure as curator of contemporary art at the Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem, the Netherlands, she worked as an independent curator, writer and educator for institutions such as the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, Goldsmiths, University of London and the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam. In 2022, she was appointed Senior Curator at Kunstmuseum St. Gallen in Switzerland.

Foto: Flavio Karrer

With the platform Lunch Bytes (2010-2015), Melanie Bühler contributed to the discourse of Post-Internet and her anthology on the project titled No Internet, No Art was one of the first comprehensive books on the subject. At the Frans Hals Museum, she presented the groundbreaking portraiture of Frans Hals in Noise! Frans Hals Otherwise (2018), alongside contemporary artists such as Nicole Eisenman, Hamishi Farah, and Özgür Kar. She also created the extensive exhibition series/publication The Art of Critique (2019-2021). Recently, in St. Gallen, she organized the exhibition Burning Down the House. Rethinking Family (2023) that critically engaged with the family as tradition, idea, and lived reality. Bühler has also curated solo exhibitions with artists including, most recently, RM, Jiajia Zhang, Anna Bella Geiger, Lubaina Himid and Marianna Simnett. She frequently writes for exhibition catalogues, exhibition venues and magazines such as Mousse and Metropolis M.

Rein Wolfs, director Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam: “We are very pleased that Melanie Bühler will be joining the Stedelijk’s artistic staff. Melanie has extensive international experience and is also very familiar with the Amsterdam art world. Her exhibition practice demonstrates a sharp radar for current affairs and for the mutual contextualisation of art and society. We are greatly looking forward to her arrival in April.”

Melanie Bühler: “The Stedelijk is the leading museum for contemporary art in the Netherlands and has organized radical and groundbreaking exhibitions throughout its history. It is a great honor to be able to build upon this legacy and to care for the Stedelijk’s world-renowned collection of contemporary art. My curatorial vision is to bring urgent issues as they manifest in artistic practice, theory, and society into the exhibition space. I aim to develop projects that engage with the Stedelijk and its specific institutional setting – its collection and context of the city of Amsterdam – while championing emerging and overlooked artists, building on the museum’s socially engaged, critical, and cutting-edge approach.”