The Mercedes-Benz Art Collection was founded in 1977 and is today one of the most important European corporate collections, featuring works of museum quality and holding an international reputation. The Collection includes around 3,000 works by approximately 800 artists – including world-famous artists such as Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, Oskar Schlemmer, Charlotte Posenenske, Franz Erhard Walther, Andrea Zittel, and Cao Fei. The Art Collection focuses on abstract-constructive pictorial concepts, critically-engaged art, and representative works and commissions on themes such as automobility, design, and construction. Its diverse spectrum of media ranges from painting, drawing, sculpture, object and light art to installation, photography, and video. The Collection highlights the abstract avant-gardes of the 20th century and international contemporary art, while also featuring 20 large sculptures in public spaces – for example at Mercedes-Benz’s headquarters in Stuttgart and at Potsdamer Platz in Berlin. Exemplary abstract artworks from the 20th century are part of the Collection, ranging from works from the Bauhaus and classical modernism, concrete art, constructivism and art informel after 1945 to the European ZERO movement, minimalism and conceptual art, Neo Geo, postminimalism, and conceptual tendencies.

Our Collection embodies Mercedes-Benz’s broader social commitment to culture and education. With the Mercedes-Benz Art Collection, the company aims to create a tangible benefit in the public interest. The basis for this is Mercedes-Benz’s understanding of its role in reacting to social issues and developments in a responsible way. The company’s global presence is reflected in the greater mobility of the Collection: exhibitions of the works presented on company grounds as well as in international museums offer the art-interested public opportunities to engage with the Collection on a broad basis. The Mercedes-Benz Art Collection attaches great importance to the acquisition of recent works by young artists in order to contribute to a responsible policy of support for the next generation. In addition, its collecting practice is consistently geared towards diversity and the promotion of international art, the diversity of cultures, orientations, and views, a broad spectrum of multimedia works and socially-engaged art, and the further establishment of women in the context of the Collection. The Mercedes-Benz Art Collection has been curated by Dr. Renate Wiehager since 2001.