BREMEN.- "The Dachshund. An Icon off the Leash" (31 October 2026 – 28 March 2027) is the first exhibition dedicated to dachshunds in art. With around 120 historical and contemporary works, the show explores various perspectives of the dachshund in art, ranging from its origin as a hunting dog, its role as an urban companion of the bourgeoisie, popular muse and inspiration to artists through to the iconic figure we find everywhere today. In addition, dachshunds themselves will be both protagonists and audience during the exhibition.

With major works, the show "The Dachshund. An Icon off the Leash" traces the appearance of the dachshund in art, starting with its traditional role as hunting dog, its popularity as companions of the bourgeoisie and today its emergence as ubiquitous iconic and fashionable figure. The dachshund's star is not just rising among dog-owners, its unmistakable shape can be found everywhere: on cups, socks and jumpers. They have been well-loved companions and objects onto which major artists have projected their emotions. As a result, they are much more than a simple motif – they are family members, helpers and an expression of a particular view of the world.

The exhibition at the Kunsthalle Bremen takes a humorous and critical view of major works from the areas of painting, drawing, photography, video, installation and performance art as well as pop culture. Works on display include pieces by Pierre Bonnard, Thorsten Brinkmann, Elina Brotherus, Franz Burkhardt, Otto Dix, David Hockney, Fritz Koch-Gotha, Max Liebermann, Pablo Picasso, Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein, Rosemarie Trockel, Paloma Varga Weisz, Édouard Vuillard, Andy Warhol and Ylla.

The show includes loans from the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek; Kunstmuseum Pablo Picasso, Münster; Musée d'Art Moderne, Paris; the Royal Collection, London; the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh and the David Hockney Foundation.

Exhibition Sections

The exhibition is divided into seven sections. Galleries one and three contain major installations. Our four-legged friends are welcome in four galleries: They are able to visit the artworks and installations in the first and last rooms of the show. In addition, they can spend time in the Dachshund Lounge and experience the Dackelier.

Toxie Love

In the first gallery visitors are welcomed by a work created especially for the exhibition by Thorsten Brinkmann (*1971) that presents dachshund lovers with their own bazaar of desire: A four-metre-long inflatable object is enthroned in the centre of the installation "Toxie Love" (2026): a grinning mix of dachshund and duck, exuberantly surrounded by an arrangement of artworks and numerous dachshund objects. Various carpets and pink wallpaper create a fusion of living room, fun park and pop art factory.

In addition to sculptures and photographs by the artist, the installation is based on around 1,200 loans from the Dackelmuseum (Dachshund Museum) in Regensburg, the only museum of its kind in the world. Four-legged friends are explicitly welcome in this room in which works, including paw prints, have been hung very low.

Dachshund Olympus

The second gallery features the design icon Waldi and the iconic dachshund Lump by Pablo Picasso. Waldi was the colourfully striped mascot of the 1972 Olympics in Munich. It was the very first official Olympic mascot. Waldi was designed by the designer Elena Schwaiger from the team of Ulm-based graphic artist Otl Aicher, whose sport pictograms can still be seen in schools and sports facilities.

Picasso's single line drawing is an amazingly accurate technical distillation of the shape and character of a dachshund. It is therefore not surprising that this pictogram appears on an endless number of merchandising products – for example, cups, bags and, last but not least, the Olunda series sold at the furniture store IKEA.

Half a century later, Picasso also created a no less legendary plate which he dedicated to his dachshund Lump. The plate "Pour Lump" is one-of-a-kind, a unique museum piece, surrounded by the aura of a fortuitous art historical moment. The American photojournalist David Douglas Duncan captured the creation of the plate and the special relationship between Picasso and Lump in a series of photographs.

Form Follows Function

In the third gallery it becomes clear that without the hunt there would be no dachshund. Dachshunds can be traced back to the German Hound and other hunting dogs, a breeding program that over generations resulted in a short-legged specialist primarily used to hunt burrow-dwelling animals. Their job was to scent and flush out badgers, foxes and other animals in subterranean burrows. Drawings show agile dogs with short legs at work. The first examples from the second half of the nineteenth century depict this distinctive breed. Their stature is recognisable today as a typical dachshund. In 1879, breeding standards were set, leading to the foundation in 1888 of the Deutsche Teckelklub e. V. (German Dachshund Club – DTK).

A comprehensive installation developed for the exhibition by the sculptor and graphic artist Franz Burkhardt (*1966) creates the impression of a hunting room. It is surrounded by wallpaper with a dachshund and oak design and deep brown wainscoting. Prints, paintings, postcards and newspaper pages depict the hunting dog in various historic settings. A display cabinet presents various objects and memorabilia.

Being and Dozing

Gallery four includes works by Pierre Bonnard, Max Liebermann, David Hockney, Hugo Fortes and Elina Brotherus showing the everyday co-existence of artists and animals. "They are like little people to me," said Hockney, who beginning in 1993 spent two years obsessively painting and drawing his two brown short haired dachshunds Stanley and Boodgie.

His entire life, the artist Pierre Bonnard was surrounded by cats and dogs. Numerous photographs illustrate his deep emotional bond with nature and all its creations. In the 1920s, up to four dachshunds supposedly lived in Bonnard's house.

Max Liebermann's paintings, drawings and prints present his dachshund in a variety of domestic scenes. In his portraits and scenes of family life, they appear as reliable amplifiers of harmony. His first dachshund, Männe, was a birthday present from Hugo von Tschudi, at the time the director of the National Gallery in Berlin.

From Lapdog to Pop Dog

In the next gallery, the little dog, who notoriously sees the world from below, comes eye-to-eye with humans on their level. Surprisingly, dachshunds can also be found in the traditional pose of mother and child. In the 1898 portrait that Friedrich August von Kaulbach created of his wife Frida, she is carrying the family's dachshund like a baby.

In her self-portrait "My Dog Is Cuter Than Your Ugly Baby" (2013), Elina Brotherus summed up a personal unfulfilled desire for a child. In the photograph, she presents herself with her dachshund, provocatively holding up her middle finger in order to advocate for alternative family constellations – an aspect that also appears in works by Andy Warhol.

For this American pop artist, his dachshund Archie was a part of his cultivated image for years. Warhol's perfect self-stylisation is inseparable from his alter ego in his appearances at opening events, in restaurants, in interviews and at photo shoots.

More Human than Hound

Gallery five is dedicated to dachshunds in illustrations in which they appear more or less as caricatures. The habits and the characteristics attributed to them are an invitation to exaggeration and anthropomorphisation. Beginning in the nineteenth century, this became a recipe for success that continues to this day. In 1930, the humanised Waldi featured as a famous protagonist in children's literature. The book, illustrated by Fritz Koch-Gotha with the story by Walter Andreas Sixtus, could still be found in children's bedrooms long after the end of World War II.

What Does the Dachshund Want?

Sausages would be the easy answer. The artist Sonja Alhäuser explored the associative proximity between the Wiener Dog / Sausage Dog and the fast-food Hot Dog. Her opulent mural and the integrated recipe drawings such as a "Verwurstung" (Hot Dog-Havoc, 2026) dissect step-by-step how sausage is created for a hot dog, where lifes are lost and the perversions and obscenities in the narrower and broader senses that are concealed throughout the entire process.

The artistic duo of Krõõt Juurak and Alex Bailey works with a change in perspective: Their video documentation created ahead of the exhibition with dachshunds from Bremen, "Performances for Dachshunds" (2026), shows encounters between the two performers and the dachshunds they invited. Every encounter lasted around twenty minutes in which the duo performed exclusively for the dogs.