DUSSELDORF.- The 2026 program at K20 K21 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen celebrates the transformative potential of art and the art institution. Under the directorship of Susanne Gaensheimer, the Kunstsammlung continues its goal to become a more inclusive and democratic museum.

The year begins with the tail-end of two group exhibitions at both houses: Queer Modernism. 1900 to 1950 at K20, and Land and Soil. How we Live Together at K21. These ambitious projects offer alternative narratives to the traditional art historical canon.

In the spring, the largest exhibition hall of K20 will be reopened with an artist installation that doubles as a functioning PLAYGROUND, bringing imagination, joy, and play within the museum’s walls. Subsequent exhibitions at K20 feature two artists disparate in time and place, but who both redefine the artistic use of color, perspective and form: firstly, the debut European solo exhibition of American cult figure Anne Truitt, a legend of Minimalism; and "Blaue Reiter" founder Franz Marc, whose wartime portraits of animals occupy a pivotal place in the development of abstraction.

K21 will dedicate solo exhibitions to each Jon Rafman and the duo Holly Herndon & Mat Dryhurst, who reflect on the rise of artificial intelligence, its societal impact, and creative potential. The year will close with the 2026 edition of the K21 Global Art Award, as well as a whole-museum takeover by Rhineland native and internationally recognized artist Thomas Schütte.

K20
Anne Truitt: Pioneer of Minimal Art
March 28–August 2, 2026

The Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen is delighted to present the first comprehensive European exhibition of the work of US-American artist and writer Anne Truitt (1921–2004). Showcasing the work of one of the most influential artists of Minimalism, the exhibition features more than 100 impressive works spanning four decades. Minimalism, popularized by artists such as Donald Judd, Blinky Palermo und Carmen Herrera is characterized by the use of simple forms, vibrant colors, and a focus on clarity and essence. In the exhibition, Truitt’s works invite viewers to engage with the emotional aspects of color, form, and space.

Playground
from April 25, 2026

Let’s play! From April 25, 2026, the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen will open a large-scale artist-designed playground by Sonia Kazovsky and Oded Rimon in K20. On view and entirely usable over the course of one year, Playground will completely transform the largest exhibition hall of the museum into a locale for children and their families. Playground is conceived of as an installation that ignites imagination and play, and will be accompanied by a reading- and coffee corner for parents. This initiative follows a long lineage of institutional exhibition projects for children, including Tate Play, The Playground Project (Kunsthalle Zürich, etc.), BauBau (Gropius Bau), For Children. Art Stories since 1968 (Haus der Kunst, Munich) and builds on the Kunstsammlung’s desire to open its building, programming and institutional methodologies to broader audiences.

Franz Marc: The Quest for a Better World
September 12, 2026–January 24, 2027

Franz Marc’s Expressionist works fascinate viewers with their vibrant colors and deeply moving themes. His depictions of animals are particularly captivating. They stand for harmony and a deep connection to nature—values that are often lost in our modern age. Although Franz Marc (1880–1916) led a rather secluded life, he was anything but a loner. As a committed artist and critic, he cultivated an extensive network in Paris, Berlin, and Munich. Together with Wassily Kandinsky, Marc founded the editorial collective Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) and was a passionate advocate of modern art. The exhibition at the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf offers a comprehensive insight into the work of this extraordinary artist.

K21

Land and Soil: How We Live Together
November 29, 2025–April 19, 2026

Featuring: Havîn Al-Sîndy, Maria Thereza Alves, Asche Lützerathi (otherhosted by Sybling—JP Raether & Sarah Friend), Joseph Beuys, AA Bronson, Cercle d'Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise (Congolese Plantation Workers Art League, CAPTC), Liu Chuang, Simon Denny, Jan Dibbets, Nir Evron, Simone Fattal, Ximena Garrido-Lecca, Jef Geys, Robert Gober, Dor Guez, Andreas Gursky, Christopher Kulendran Thomas, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Richard Long, Gordon Matta-Clark, Boris Mikhailov, Lutz Mommartz, Grace Ndiritu, Simone Nieweg, Chris Reinecke, Ugo Rondinone, Thomas Ruff, Lin May Saeed, Shimabuku, terra0, Ron Tran, Franz West, Alex Wissel

The exhibition Land and Soil. How We Live Together leads us back to the foundations of human coexistence. It invites visitors to gather around questions of living, owning, and sharing, and to envision a just and sustainable future. For the first time, an exhibition will span the entire former parliament building of K21 and extend to the adjacent Ständehauspark, addressing the ground the museum stands on—both geographically and historically. Around thirty international artists and collectives will present various models of administrating resources —from indigenous ways of planning to co-ownership and utopian blockchain projects

Coal, earth, lotus silk, pine needles, chocolate: the exhibition touches on elementals in both material and form. It takes us to Brazil, Korea, the Congo, Japan, the USA, China, Peru, Vietnam, Iraq, Sri Lanka, the Middle East and back to Germany. It explores the newest fantasies of libertarian thinkers who seek to build their own states or occupy Mars. And it looks at the foundations of the industrial wealth of Düsseldorf: On its last day, a performance by Sybling (JP Raether & Sarah Friend) will lead to the nearby open-pit coal mine Garzweiler, a place of tensions between industry and preservation, capital gain and activism, that underpin this exhibition.

Jon Rafman
May 30–September 27, 2026

Jon Rafman (b. 1981, in Montreal) has been considered a pioneering artist of the digital age since the 2010s. Euphoric and critical at the same time, he uses the possibilities of the internet and its exuberant computer-based visual language for his videos and films. Through his engagement with music, pop culture, fashion, and design, Rafman continuously experiments with and develops new imaging techniques. The exhibition at K21 will feature Rafman’s latest experiments with artificial intelligence (AI) in a museum setting for the first time. This will be the artist’s first solo exhibition in a German museum, presenting an overview of his work since 2008, including Nine Eyes of Google Street View (2008–ongoing), Kool Aid Man in Second Life (2008–11), and Dream Journal (2019). The exhibition will focus on his current project, Mainstream Media Network, which includes a music television channel currently in development that uses AI models to revive the historic MTV of the 1980s. The exhibition will be accompanied by an extensive lecture and education program focusing particularly on media literacy for young people. A monographic publication will also be released.

Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst
June 27–October 11, 2026

Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf and the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin partner to realize a major exhibition with artists and technologists Holly Herndon (b. 1980 in Johnson City) and Mat Dryhurst (b. 1984 in Birmingham). The duo is internationally recognized for their work at the intersection of art, music, machine learning, and experimental organization.

With Starmirror, Herndon and Dryhurst transform the exhibition spaces of both institutions into a training ground for collaborative art and music production between humans and AI. Working with the architectural office sub, they create an immersive sound installation that functions simultaneously as a recording and listening environment. Throughout the exhibition, visitors are invited to participate in public vocal recording sessions, alongside local community choirs and under the guidance of a vocal ensemble. The recordings will form a dataset that enables the artists to form an AI choir. A songbook specifically developed for the project is based on “Ordo Virtutum”, a 12th-century medieval morality play by Hildegard von Bingen–the Benedictine abbess and polymath–in which a soul must choose between the forces of good and evil. The exhibition presents AI as a tangible, collective process and sheds light on hierarchies of technical protocols and their invisible role in shaping the world around us.

The exhibition is one out of eleven selected projects, that the German Federal Cultural Foundation (Kulturstiftung des Bundes) supports through its new program “Art & AI—Fonds for Artistic Projects on AI and society”.

The exhibition design is conceived by the architectural office sub.

Thomas Schütte
November 7, 2026–April 18, 2027

The multifaceted practice of Thomas Schütte (b. 1954, in Oldenburg) has played a defining role in contemporary art of the last 40 years. His works have been exhibited in the world’s most prominent museums, most recently at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2024. In autumn 2026, the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen will dedicate a large-scale solo exhibition to him. In Schütte’s architectural models, we encounter proposals for how to inhabit public and private spaces. At the same time, however, these proposals comment on the reality of our society. His sculptures and installations are also characterized by subtle humor and a passion for experimenting with a wide variety of materials and themes, combining modeling clay, wood, and textiles with traditional techniques such as glazed ceramics, cast bronze, and watercolor. The artist, known for his unusual presentation formats, will occupy the piazza on the ground floor and the exhibition space in the basement of K21. Developed in close collaboration with the artist, this exhibition also represents a new examination of the Ständehaus both as an institution and as an architectural structure.

K21 Global Art Award 2026

The Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, in cooperation with the Friends of the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, presents the annual K21 Global Art Award. In 2023, the artist Mthwakazi Marasela (b. 1977, in Thokoza, South Africa) was the first recipient of the award, which included the purchase of a group of works. In 2024, Wang Tuo (b. 1984 in Changchun, China) was honored with the award for his work The Second Interrogation (2022). The 2025 recipient of the award was the Brazilian artist Tadáskía.

In 2026, the K21 Global Art Award will be presented for the fourth time. The award supports artists at the beginning or in the middle of their careers and includes a purchase for the K21 collection. It thus makes an important contribution to making the collection of the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen more diverse and pluralistic.