The abundance of what was hoarded in his sprawling studio, archive, and workspaces in the house in Mülheim an der Ruhr, and is now distributed across three locations in the republic, was already unfathomable in sheer quantity: except in Nekes' head. The largest private collection of optical machines and image worlds of all kinds. Museum exhibitions could only ever show parts, as did the Museum Ludwig in Cologne in 2002 with "I see something, which you cannot see!" In terms of originality, rarity and beauty, quality as well as quantity, the collection has no equal.
Nekes himself directed about a hundred short and feature films. The artist, born in 1944 in Erfurt, has been involved in film politics, advised Hilmar Hoffmann on the conception of the Frankfurt Film Museum, and taught film understanding with professorships in Hamburg, Wuppertal, Offenbach, and Cologne, as well as guest lectures at dozens of European and American universities. As a collector, he was a foundational researcher; as a filmmaker, a media theorist; as a cinephile, a sober analyst and measured enthusiast.
In 1978, Nekes, who grew up in the Ruhr Area, returned to Mülheim and moved with his then-wife and colleague Dore O. into a plot in the former leather factory that had previously belonged to his wife's family. Around 1968, stagnation in the Federal Republic seemed to be over. Not only politically and socially. It looked as if people like Nekes, Costard, Straub, Bitomsky, and Farocki, Emigholz, Kristl, or Wyborny could be more than mere starving artists. The "New German Cinema" was then cultivating its fringe areas. Experimental film from Germany was the most significant internationally in the 1970s. At the age of 24, Nekes received a "Golden Bambi" for his overall work up to that time. For Nekes, who studied linguistics and psychology in Freiburg and Bonn, film – constructed and organized from the formal approach, image rhythm, dimensions of movement, and from the individual frame – was more related to mathematics and music than to literature.
A system of optical and acoustic signs. Autonomous art. Nekes documented everything about his collection and produced evening-length 35mm documentaries such as "What Really Happened Between the Images?" The "real" image of the world and the image of man encompasses a radius that – to name just a few – ranges from the Lumière brothers and Georges Méliès to Godard and Kubrick, from Giotto, Dürer, and Leonardo to the Zero group. It includes all those who contemplated phenomena of the optical and their effects, shaping and revolutionizing them.
It took several years for the heir of the Nekes, who passed away in 2017, to regulate the legacy. The concerted action for the acquisition involved, among others, the NRW Ministry of Culture and Science, the Cultural Foundation of the Federal States, as well as institutions in Hesse and Brandenburg. The decentralized locations that want and should work together in the future, not competitively with the collection, are the Theatre Studies Collection of the University of Cologne, the Filmmuseum Frankfurt, and the Film School Konrad Wolf in Potsdam-Babelsberg, thus places of public access, research, and education.
