| . |
Before founding Alidade in Madrid in 2026, Birte Kleemann held senior directorial roles at Michael Werner Gallery and Pace in New York. In these positions, she worked closely with artists, estates, collectors, and institutions, supporting museum acquisitions, exhibitions, and publications.Her professional background is rooted in Europe and the United States. After working at Galerie EIGEN+ART in Berlin for seven years, Birte co-founded her own gallery before relocating to New York in 2008, where she continued to build long-term relationships with artists, institutions, and collections.At Pace Gallery, her curatorial work included BERLIN 2000 in 2009, a large-scale survey examining the artistic and social networks that formed in Berlin in the early 2000s, as well as Joseph Beuys: Make the Secrets Productive in 2010, the first major survey of the artist’s work in New York in over three decades. Both projects were accompanied by publications.In 2012, she presented WUNDERKAMMER at Autocenter Berlin, using the cabinet of curiosities—the foundation of the modern museum—as a framework for contemporary works across media, with a catalogue as part of the project.In 2010, Misericordia brought together Old Master works by artists such as Lucas Cranach the Elder and Francisco de Zurbarán with contemporary positions including Marina Abramović, Joseph Beuys, Louise Bourgeois, Chris Burden, James Lee Byars, Lucio Fontana, Terence Koh, and Bill Viola. Framed around the theme of mercy, the exhibition was accompanied by a catalogue and presented at PRISM Gallery, Los Angeles.The exhibition PRAXIS, curated in 2014 at Wayne State University, Detroit, addressed social unrest, political movements, and questions of gender and civil rights, featuring works by Barbra Jones-Hogu, Barbara Kruger, Yoko Ono, Martha Rosler, and Sylvia Sleigh, and was accompanied by a catalogue.
Further curatorial projects include Shakers & Movers in 2013 at VW–VeneKlasen/Werner, a group exhibition bringing together seminal figures from performance, music, and conceptual art, including James Lee Byars, John Cage, Yoko Ono, and ULAY.More recently, her curatorial work and institutional liaison have focused increasingly on Asia. Projects include the solo exhibition A.R. Penck: Will Sign Become Reality? at the Fosun Art Foundation in Shanghai in 2017, curated by Dr. Qilan Shen and presented with a bilingual catalogue.In 2019, Birte co-curated SIGHTINGS | Positions of Art from Germany with Zheng Wen at the Art Museum of Nanjing University of the Arts, a survey tracing German art from Wilhelm Lehmbruck and Ernst Wilhelm Nay through Joseph Beuys and Jörg Immendorff, accompanied by a bilingual catalogue.In the same year, she curated ULAY for Richard Saltoun in London, presenting a survey of four decades of the artist’s practice, during which ULAY performed a rare live photogram action.In 2024, she worked on exhibition coordination, installation, and catalogue editorial for Markus Lüpertz: Sins, Myths, and Other Questions at the HEREDIUM Foundation in Daejeon, Korea.This line of institutional work continues with Per Kirkeby: I Make My Own System, a solo exhibition at the He Art Museum in Shunde, Guangzhou in 2026, co-curated with Dr. Qilan Shen and presented with a bilingual monograph.In parallel, Birte has maintained an extensive editorial practice and has written and edited for the Milan-Berlin-based fashion and art magazine King Kong, founded in 2016 by Ali Kepenek and Mikel Benhaim, contributing over several years essays and coordinating editorial projects on artists such as Florine Stettheimer, Sylvia Sleigh, Judith Bernstein, Peter Saul, Erika Beckmann, Edward Kienholz, and ULAY, alongside broader historical, contemporary, and estate-based work.Birte holds an MFA Diploma in scenography from the Academie Beeldende Kunsten Maastricht, and studied at Wimbledon School of Art in London.