Six exhibitions you shouldn't miss

Museum outlook 2023

What are your New Year's resolutions? Perhaps one of them is to go to the museum more often? If not, make sure you put this resolution on your list, because 2023 will be an exciting exhibition year in Düsseldorf. One that will test the permeability of genre boundaries with relish and roll out the red carpet for contemporary positions in particular. Several major retrospectives are on the agenda and, if you like, an exploration of the most diverse formats and disciplines - from sound art to photographic art, from the artistic measurement of a hybrid nature with the means of augmented reality to the marriage of art and social activism. Or would you like to get to know the work of a pioneering representative of classical modernism better? From next fall, a renowned Düsseldorf museum will also be exploring the fascination of horror. So thrills are guaranteed!

"Klangraum KIT: the space between your ears - Bojan Vuletić" at KIT

04.-12.02.2023

An underground exhibition space with a program that leaves plenty of room for the interdisciplinary - despite its limited square meters. The KIT, short for "Art in the Tunnel", is located between the tunnel tubes for car traffic under the Mannesmannufer. A raw concrete space that offers 888 square meters of accessible space and tapers off in the entrance area with a ramp. It is not least this unusual architecture that inspires extraordinary exhibitions, often involving music and sound. The Sonic Youth exhibition, for example, is unforgettable. In February, Klangraum KIT presents "the space between your ears", five expansive sound works by sound artist Bojan Vuletić. On the opening night, Vuletić will combine the installative art experience with a live performance: outstanding musicians from New York, London, Israel and Germany will be guests. Are you familiar with the name Bojan Vuletić? Well, the man is co-founder of the Düsseldorf Asphalt Festival and has set out to transcend formal and genre boundaries. His own compositional works range from chamber music to improvisation and pop. 

"Out of Sight. Andreas Gefeller Photographs" at the NRW-Forum

03.03.-14.05.2023

The often large-format works of Düsseldorf-based photo artist Andreas Gefeller, born in 1970, have an immediate presence. At the same time, however, they are multidimensional and remain vague. Logical breaks in the images raise questions about perspective and the origin of what is depicted. The works in the "Supervisions" series (2002-2015), for example, are shot from a height of two meters and in thousands of individual digital images, showing urban spaces such as prefabricated apartments, a parking lot or the Berlin Holocaust Memorial. For his early series "Soma" (2000), Gefeller photographed vacation resorts on Gran Canaria - at night and with long exposures. This brings something into view that is normally "out of sight", as the title of the exhibition might suggest. In the series "Flames" (2022), forms become visible that are reminiscent of 3D renderings or X-ray images. However, the optical confusion that sometimes unfolds in Gefeller's work is not an end in itself. Through his experimental approach to photography, the photographic artist not only questions his own medium and, linked to this, our perception of the world - his theme is also always technicized society and its intervention in nature. The fact that Andreas Gefeller, whose work has already been shown from London to Beijing, is now having his first retrospective in his home city (60 works are on display) is as pleasing as it is significant: Düsseldorf is and remains an international center of photographic art. 

"Jenny Holzer" in the Kunstsammlung NRW | K21

11.03.-06.08.2023

You can also enjoy a retrospective at K21 in the Ständehaus starting in March - or to be more precise, the largest overview exhibition of Jenny Holzer's work that has ever been shown in Germany. Born in 1950, the American artist is considered one of the most important artists of her generation. Her work? A fusion of art and language, poetry and activism. Holzer achieved international fame with her "Truisms" - memorable and subversive one-liners that denounce political and social grievances. Since the late 1970s, the conceptual and installation artist has been bringing these to the public via various media. Initially via posters, then also by means of projections on house walls or LED lettering, for example. Holzer experimented with artistic formats and new technologies from the very beginning. Her work "Abuse of Power Comes as No Surprise" inspired the #MeToo movement's hashtag #notsurprised. However, the artist's complex oeuvre can by no means be reduced to her one-liners, which is also evident in the exhibition at K21. In addition to Holzer's poster works, her paintings and stone works, with which she addresses topics such as war and populism, are also on display. But no matter which of her works you look at - what they all have in common is a deeply democratic aspiration combined with the invitation to engage in a critical discourse on the challenges of the present. Join in the discussion!

"AR Biennale: Hybrid Nature" in the courtyard of honor

May to October 2023

When the AR Biennale celebrated its premiere in the Ehrenhof in 2021, it was the first event of its kind in the world. Next year, the NRW-Forum, organizer of the AR Biennale, will present the second edition of the art event, which is dedicated to augmented reality as an exciting contemporary form of representation. As in 2021, a digital sculpture park will be set up once again. The fact that exploring the park will take you through the Ehrenhof and parts of the courtyard gardens while you enter a digital world via AR app and smartphone or tablet makes it extremely appealing - and deepens the theme of the AR Biennale 2023, which is "Hybrid Nature" and focuses on the fusion of nature, humans and technology. It brings together works by international artists and collectives such as Afroscope (Nana Opoku), Banz & Bowinkel, Nancy Baker Cahill, Okta Collective and Pau Jiménez. In some cases, you can interact with them in real time. "In times of conflict and ongoing economic and ecological crises, nature has once again become an important place of retreat for people," say the organizers. As part of the AR Biennale "Hybrid Nature", you can expect an expanded experience of nature that is nourished not least by visions of a sustainable future.

"Chaïm Soutine" at the Kunstsammlung NRW | K20

02.09.2023–14.04.2024

His expressive but also drastic works reflect the attitude to life of an entire era: Chaïm Soutine, born in 1893, grew up in the former Russian Empire (now Belarus), moved to Paris in 1913, later also temporarily to the south of France, and became friends with the painter Amadeo Modigliani. He found role models in El Greco, Velázquez and Rembrandt, whose works he admired in the Louvre, but also in Cézanne, van Gogh and Pierre Bonnard. In the early 1920s, Soutine achieved his international breakthrough as an artist. But being an outsider and being torn remain the life themes of this important representative of classical modernism, who lived for a long time in extreme poverty in the Parisian artists' colony of La Ruche. He painted dead animals, swaying landscapes, distorted portraits, often of people who, like himself, were struggling economically and socially. Chaïm Soutine was not only an immigrant, but also a Jew. The alienation and uprootedness that he felt throughout his life is the overarching theme of the exhibition at the K20 and spans the arc right up to the present day. In Belarus, Soutine's work "Eva" became a symbol of protest against the Lukashenko regime in 2020 and even adorned T-shirts, complete with a stinky finger.

"Death and the Devil. Fascination of Horror" at the Museum Kunstpalast

14.09.2023–21.01.2024

What do Alexander McQueen and Billie Eilish, Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier and US painter, conceptual artist and performer Eliza Douglas have in common? They all give us the creeps from time to time. At least that's the working thesis of the exhibition "Death and the Devil. Fascination of Horror", with which the Museum Kunstpalast is leading us into the fall next year. Death and horror as a theme in contemporary art, but also in fashion, music and film - for the first time, a show will shed light on the legacy and continuation of artistic strategies of horror. The spectrum of the 120 works on display ranges from classical painting and sculpture to elaborate installations. Positions by visual artists such as the Chapman Brothers, Berlinde de Bruyckere and Mary Sibande are juxtaposed with works by the American photo artist Andres Serrano, known for his photographs of corpses, or the blood-filled sneakers by the New York art collective MSCHF. Death metal is just as much a part of the exhibition as the early horror films of the 20th century, which, alongside historical evidence of the "horror" genre from the Renaissance or Romanticism, primarily serve to contextualize it. The show mainly brings together works from the past two decades. Horror disturbs and moves, He provokes, fires the imagination and gets to the heart of the matter. This makes him productive for the future.

This article is funded by REACT-EU.

Cover picture: Düsseldorf Tourismus