Stephanie Rosenthal Named Project Director of Guggenheim Abu Dhabi
Stephanie Rosenthal has been introduced as the brand new mission director of the long-awaited Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, a collaboration between Abu Dhabi’s Division of Tradition and Tourism and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Basis that has been within the works for almost twenty years. Rosenthal will depart Berlin’s Gropius Bau, the place she has served since arriving in 2018 because the gallery’s first feminine director. In her new position with the Guggenheim, she’s going to take cost of the establishment’s forecast 2025 opening, working in tandem with Maisa Al Qassimi, Guggenheim Abu Dhabi’s appearing mission director for the Division of Tradition and Tourism.
Whereas at Gropius Bau, Rosenthal diversified the roster of up to date artists exhibiting there and inaugurated the museum’s artist-in-residence program. Previous to coming to the German gallery, she put in a decade at London’s Hayward Gallery, the place she was chief curator. Her appointment as mission director of Guggenheim Abu Dhabi unexpectedly coincides with the dying of UAE president Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed al Nahyan. Khalifa was extensively credited with modernizing the nation and was a pressure in elevating its cultural presence on the worldwide stage. Among the many tasks that flourished below his rule—and, since 2014, when Khalifa suffered a debilitating stroke, that of his brother, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed—are the Louvre Abu Dhabi, in partnership with the Paris museum, and the Guggenheim, with each establishments being constructed on the cultural hub of Saadiyat Island.
First introduced in 2006 with a projected completion date of 2012, Guggenheim Abu Dhabi has encountered quite a few delays attributable to varied components together with battles with the Labor Coalition over the working circumstances of the migrant laborers retained to assemble the establishment, and the Covid-19 disaster. The Frank Gehry–designed outpost on the fringe of the Persian Gulf will embody 450,000 sq. toes, making it roughly twelve instances the scale of the Guggenheim’s New York flagship. Assortment constructing has continued apace, with the museum assembling some 600 works courting from 1965 to the current over the previous 13 years.
