DUSSELDORF.- K20
Chagall
March 15–August 10, 2025

Marc Chagall (1887–1985) is one of the most fascinating artists of modernism. The exhibition at the K20 of the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, organized in cooperation with the Albertina in Vienna, is a monographic exhibition on the work of the Russian-French painter. Chagall grew up in the small town of Vitebsk (in present-day Belarus) as the eldest child of an Orthodox Jewish family and reflected on his origins throughout his life. His paintings tell of everyday life and customs, but also of exclusion and pogroms. They deal with the trauma of persecution, but also with the dream of a better life.

His fantastic and poetic imagery is characterized by bright, intense colors and motifs that remain enigmatic to this day. On the fortieth anniversary of the painter’s death, the exhibition brings together some 100 works from all phases of his career. One focus is on the early works created between 1910 and 1923. As a young artist in Paris, Chagall experimented with Fauvism and Cubism, combining the new stylistic tendencies with Jewish motifs and Russian folklore. This was unique in his time and made him the “wunderkind of modernism.” The exhibition reveals not only the painterly influences on Chagall’s early work. The lesser known dark and socially critical side of the artist, which has not lost its relevance to this day, can also be discovered.

Forgotten Avant-Garde—Queer Modernism
September 20, 2025–February 15, 2026

Forgotten Avant-Garde—Queer Modernism at the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen is the first exhibition in Europe to present the previously underestimated but groundbreaking contribution of queer artists to modernism. In their programs, queer artists created alternatives to prevailing lifestyles that placed the influence and perspective of gender and sexuality on styles, movements, and programs at the center of their artistic work. Desire, individual experience, the politics of self-expression, and social history become visible in their work. Many of these artists have so far been marginalized in the dominant historiography or dismissed as “counter-modern.” Others are examined for the first time in the exhibition from the perspective of queer aesthetics.

The result of years of research, this exhibition completes our picture of modernism with over forty artists, some of whom have been forgotten and some of whom are very well known. It includes works from Eastern and Western Europe, from North and Latin America. It also tells the story of queer life in a time marked by war, persecution, and resistance.

K21
Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger
February 22–August 31, 2025

The Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen is the first German institution to present an overview of the groundbreaking work of the painter, psychoanalyst, philosopher and peace activist Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger (BRACHA), who was born in Tel Aviv in 1948. While her theory of the matrixial gaze has been widely received in art and academia, and her works are collected and discussed internationally, BRACHA first attracted widespread attention in Germany after she resigned from the selection committee for the artistic direction of documenta 16—in part because the daughter of Holocaust survivors had not felt able to exhibit in Germany for forty years.

The exhibition includes her most recent paintings, examples of her early work from the 1980s, and artist’s books in which BRACHA comments on current events in drawings and ink painting. Early on, BRACHA used the photocopier to create images, mixed ashes into pigments, and explored the possibility of reproducing documents of mass murder. In her paintings, which evolve over a period of four to nine years in an unconscious process, female victims of the Shoah encounter figures from ancient myths. BRACHA’s art focuses on the vulnerability and the interdependence of all life. In doing so, she inspires a younger generation of artists interested in inherited trauma and healing. BRACHA’s ethical and aesthetic program pointes the way out of the destructive black-and-white logic of today’s algorithm-driven conflicts and opens up new for humanity, compassion, and openness to the future.

Julie Mehretu
May 10–October 12, 2025

The Ethiopian American artist Julie Mehretu (b. 1970, Addis Ababa) is one of the most influential painters working today. This first major solo exhibition in Germany presents the full range of Mehretu’s work, from the urban-inspired line drawings of the 1990s to her most recent abstract paintings of spectacular scale. At the same time, the exhibition offers deep insights into the genesis of Mehretu’s works. She often begins with media images of political events and historical sites, which she translates into complex abstract compositions through numerous notations, overpaintings, and maskings. In the exhibition at K21, Mehretu’s image archive will be shown for the first time alongside her works. This vividly demonstrate how art is created and how it grants consciousness, freedom, and agency in the face of the storm of events conveyed by the media.

Land and Soil
November 29, 2025–April 19, 2026

With works by Maria Thereza Alves, Simon Denny, Nir Evron, Dor Guez, Congolese Plantation Workers Art League (CATPC), Christopher Kulendran Thomas, Gordon Matta-Clark, Kathryn Larsen, Grace Ndiritu, Johannes Paul Raether, Lin May Saeed, Shimabuku, terra0, Ron Tran, Julia Watson, among others.

Around twenty international artists and collectives explore various models of resource governance—from Indigenous societies to utopian blockchain projects. The core issue of the exhibition is the administration of land. The core issue of the exhibition is the administration of land. Why are rents so high in Düsseldorf and other cities? How can the Amazon be preserved as the Earth‘s green lung?

Expansive video installations, sculptures made of chocolate, excursions, and collectively designed meeting spaces invite the museum and its visitors to locate themselves in the history of the global economy. Special focuses lie on the city of Düsseldorf as the headquarters of large companies, the origins of local prosperity in industrialization, especially mining, and the past of K21 as a parliament building.

The exhibition examines the ground on which the K21 stands, both historically and geographically, and invites visitors to participate in the design of a sustainable and just future.