This was confirmed by a spokeswoman for APA’s recently opened “Heidi Horten Collection” on Sunday. Accordingly, Horten died in the early hours of this Sunday morning at the age of 81 in her home on Lake Wörthersee. The new museum of the collector in the former Vienna Hanuschhof was only opened at the beginning of June.
Klagenfurt/Vienna. Heidi Goëss-Horten was born on February 13, 1941 in Vienna. In 1966 she married the entrepreneur and “department store king” Helmut Horten, who was about 30 years her senior. When he died in 1987, Heidi Horten inherited the billionaire’s entire fortune and founded the Helmut Horten Foundation a few years later. In 1994 she married the French flower wholesaler Jean-Marc Charmat, from whom she later divorced. In 2015 she finally married Anton Goëss, whose surname she uses in her double name.
Since the 1980s, Horten has expanded her extensive art collection with works from the 20th century to contemporary art in collaboration with Agnes Husslein-Arco, who now also acts as director of the “Heidi Horten Collection”. The private collection includes works by Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, Edgar Degas and Pablo Picasso. She also owns numerous works of German Expressionism, Italian Avant-Garde and Pop Art.
She presented a large part of the collection for the first time in 2018 in the Leopold Museum with the exhibition “Wow!”, which attracted almost 360,000 visitors. According to the billionaire, this success resulted in the desire to make her collection permanently accessible to the public. In 2019 she announced her plans for her own museum in Vienna. The former Hanuschhof near the Albertina was found as the location, the architects The Next Enterprise adapted the building, which finally opened on June 3rd with the first exhibition “OPEN”.
Source: Nachrichten
