Overview of current exhibitions in Düsseldorf
A selection of current exhibitions and highlights at Düsseldorf’s museums and collections.
NRW Art Collection | K20 Grabbeplatz
Yoko Ono. Music of the Mind
From 28 September 2024 to 16 March 2025
This comprehensive solo exhibition by Yoko Ono at the K20 is a cooperation with the Tate Modern in London. For decades, Ono’s work was overshadowed by her marriage to John Lennon, at least as far as the wider public were concerned. However, Ono was an artist in her own right long before she met Lennon. She is a trailblazer of early conceptual and participatory art, of film and performance, a celebrated musician and a formidable campaigner for world peace. The K20 is showing works spanning seven decades. More than 200 objects are on display, with works dating from the 1950s to the present day. Exhibits include installations, films, photography and other work from the artist’s multi-disciplinary oeuvre.
NRW Art Collection | K21 Ständehaus
Lars Eidinger. O Mensch
Until 26 January 2025
This is the first monographic museum exhibition by actor, DJ and artist Lars Eidinger. Photographs and videos created between 2018 and 2024 are on display on the first floor of the K21 art gallery. In keeping with the title of the exhibition, the focus is on people. The depicted subjects are not identifiable; Eidinger has captured them without their knowledge, mostly using his mobile phone. They are tired, exhausted, sometimes homeless people. The locations are insignificant, forgotten corners of large conurbations such as New York, Seoul or Tokyo that are not in the least bit glamorous. Or as the author Simon Lars put it in 2019: “Images that symbolise an exhausted time.”
Art Palace
Gerhard Richter. Hidden Gems
Until 2 February 2025
The works being exhibited at the Kunstpalast mainly come from private collections, with more than 120 pieces from each of Gerhard Richter’s creative phases and work groups on show. Most have never, or only rarely, been on public display. This is the most comprehensive Gerhard Richter exhibition in Germany in the last ten years. One reason that made ‘Hidden Gems’ possible is the fact that Richter chose to make his home in the Rhineland region. A former student at Düsseldorf’s Academy of Arts, he later became a professor there. Many private collectors of his work still live in the Rhineland and have made their ‘gems’ available. The exhibition includes works from the early 1960s up to the last paintings from 2017, the year when Richter decided to stop working.
Too Much Future
Until 5 January 5, 2025
The Kunstpalast has received an extremely generous donation from Florian Peters-Messer. The art collector and real estate entrepreneur from nearby Viersen has presented the museum with over 300 works, a selection of which are now on display in this exhibition. “Florian Peters-Messer is interested in works that break with the way we are used to looking at things and fundamentally challenge our understanding of art. This gift is going to significantly extend and advance our collection of contemporary art by adding some critical, political pieces,” says Felicity Korn, head of the collection of 20th and 21st century art and co-curator of Too Much Future. The exhibition includes contemporary art by Andrea Bowers, Sophie Calle and Thomas Hirschhorn, as well as works by young artists such as Harry Hachmeister, Henrike Naumann and Sophia Süßmilch.
NRW Forum
Superheroes
Until 11 May 2025
The exhibition title pretty much says it all – welcome to the universe of superheroes! From Batman and the Joker to manga and anime all the way to politics and propaganda, this exhibition showcases the diversity of the genre across eleven themed sections. On display are numerous comic books, as well as original drawings, figures and action toys, as well as film clips and media art installations. The show presents upwards of 1,600 exhibits over more than 1,200 square metres. Marvel is there, and DC, with Batman and Superman, of course, but also Sailor Moon and My Hero Academia, along with EXO and Fury from the YouNeek YouNiverse. YouNeek Studios was founded by Roye Okupe, whose superhero creations are inspired by African history, culture and mythology.
Light and Shadow
Until 27 October 2024
In the sixth exhibition of the Licht und Schatten (light and shade) series, the Kunstpalast shows photographic works by Janice Guy, Martina Sauter, Elger Esser, Anna Vogel, Eileen Quinlan and Frauke Dannert from the collection of Stadtsparkasse Düsseldorf. All the pictures challenge the limits and possibilities of photography and examine the diverse nuances of the medium.
KIT - Art in the tunnel
Der rote Faden – Follow the Thread
Until 15 September 2024
Wool, embroidery cotton, acrylic threads, carpet backing and awning fabric form the base materials for this exhibition, a literal thread to be followed. On a less material level, we associate ‘thread’ with orientation, something that holds things together externally and internally, and that we can follow. The show features works and interpretations by four artists.
Kunsthalle: Sheila Hicks "In abundance" (2023) // (Photo: Oliver Roura)
Art gallery
Sheila Hicks
Until 23 February 2025
IIn collaboration with the Josef Albers Museum Quadrat in Bottrop, the Kunsthalle art gallery is staging the first major solo exhibition of US artist Sheila Hicks in Germany. Hicks studied under Josef Albers at the Yale School of Art in the 1950s. Since then she has been exploring the question of what it is possible to do with a thread. An interesting tangential fact in this context is that Josef Albers met his wife Anni at the Bauhaus in Weimar, where she was a student in the weaving section of the textiles workshop, which she later went on to run for a time. Sheila Hicks has developed a wide range of techniques for the use of textiles, colour and structure in her work. On display at the Kunsthalle are works that follow on from the retrospective exhibition at the Josef Albers Museum, which features works from the period 1955 to 2024.
Eunbi Oh. Schaum im Nebel
Until 27 October 2024
Eunbi Oh’s installation ‘Schaum im Nebel’ (foam in the fog) is part of the Mur Brut series. The spatial arrangement initially appears familiar, but upon closer inspection inconsistencies become apparent. As Eunbi Oh metaphorically contrasts order and chaos, her work questions our relationship to reality and truth.
Eunbi Oh gained her degree at the Düsseldorf Academy of Arts in 2023 under Professor Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster.
Sammlung Philara
Cutting the Puppeteer’s Strings
20 October 2024 to 1 June 2025
The Sammlung Philara collection presents Cutting the Puppeteer’s Strings, a comprehensive group exhibition focusing on puppetry, marionette theatre and associated forms. The exhibited works pose questions, sometimes in a humorous way, about our ability to act at both a private and political level, as well as providing approaches that enable us to shift our mindset. The exhibition brings together works from Gil Bronner’s collection, loans and new, specially created works, which are augmented by a cooperation with Düsseldorf’s marionette theatre.
Julia Stoschek Foundation
Lynn Hershman Leeson. Are Our Eyes Targets?
Until 2 February 2025
The Julia Stoschek Foundation presents Are Our Eyes Targets?, the first solo exhibition of acclaimed media art pioneer Lynn Hershman Leeson in Düsseldorf. Spanning the entire second floor of the foundation’s building, the exhibition features videos, photo collages and interactive and mixed-media installations that delve into the artist’s groundbreaking methods.
Digital Diaries
Until 2 February 2025
The group exhibition Digital Diaries looks at how 16 artists have been experimenting with diaristic forms in video and digital art from the 1970s to the present day. Inspired by the iconic work The Electronic Diaries of Lynn Hershman Leeson, which is being shown simultaneously as a six-channel installation, Digital Diaries is a collections of videos, photographs, video sculptures and mixed-media works that record artists’ intimate experiences.
Langen Foundation
Toika. Pink Noise
Until 16 March 2025
Troika is a Franco-German trio of artists who explore how we are influenced by technological progress. The Langen Foundation is showing new installations and other works under the title Pink Noise. The aim of Troika is to examine how our perception of ‘nature’ is calibrated to the frequencies and spectra of digital media. ‘Pink noise’ refers to an acoustic state that contains all frequencies in the audible spectrum.
Museum Insel Hombroich
Hildegard and Erwin Heerich. Unison in Autonomy
Until 23 February 2025
Largely unnoticed by the public, Hildegard Heerich developed an independent artistic oeuvre alongside her husband, the artist and academy professor Erwin Heerich, which is still being discovered today. Starting with early collaborations in which she translated Erwin’s drawings into unconventional fabric pictures, she increasingly emancipated herself from him with her abstract textile collages and found her own self-confident visual language.
Please note: The two largest exhibition pavilions are undergoing refurbishment. Geothermal heating and new roofs are being installed at the Labyrinth and the Twelve Room House. The museum is also having barrier-free access built. This means that some areas will be inaccessible and not all exhibitions buildings are open.
Tip: You can see an overview of all Düsseldorf museums and collections, dates and further information here.
Main photo: Lars Eidinger. Installion from O Mensch at K21 (photo: Achim Kukulies)
(While we endeavour to provide correct dates, we are unable to guarantee accuracy.)
