Modern & Contemporary Art Exhibitions in Bonn

The presentation takes a comprehensive look at the collection of contemporary art, which is presented anew from different perspectives in twenty rooms. In addition to painting, installations, film and photography can be seen. The exhibition includes works that are important for the profile of the collection along with new acquisitions, gifts and loans from private collections. It combines monographic and thematic groups of works from Sigmar Polke to Monika Baer, from Tamara Grcic, Shannon Bool and Norbert Schwontkowski all the way to John Bock. A complex pathway arises for encountering the works: Outside and inside spaces can be walked into, are measured cartographically, are opened into uncertain interiors; the body is declared to be a battle zone; faces transform themselves into masks, the self plays various roles. Painting reveals itself to be tangled texture and smooth surface, orderly and disorderly overlapping, an alchemical mixture of exoticism and popular culture. Materials engage in extended discussions, photographic series gather the world into flexible repositories, painting and photography investigate the simultaneity of the clear and the unclear. The museum becomes a “space for imaginative actions” (Albert Oehlen).

Scholarship Holders of the Stiftung Kunstfonds Each year, as part of the AUSGEZEICHNET series, former scholarship holders of the Kunstfonds Foundation exhibit their work at the Kunstmuseum Bonn. This year, the jury has chosen Felix Schramm (* 1970). Schramm’s work focuses on space – its forms, its boundaries and their dissolution. For the Kunstmuseum Bonn, he is creating an installation that uses the interplay of construction and deconstruction to transform the very essence of the museum space.

On the occasion of her 90th birthday, the Kunstmuseum Bonn is dedicating a room in its collection presentation to the conceptual painter Rune Mields (*1935 in Münster, lives and works in Cologne). Numerous works by the artist have long been a permanent fixture in the museum’s collection. A donation from Prof. Dr Gerhard Pfennig, Bonn, has completed the collection since 2024, from which a selection of works will now be shown in a single artist room in the museum’s collection presentation. The presentation is complemented by several loans from Galerie Judith Andreae, Bonn, which represents the artist. Rune Mields has been working on a wide-ranging oeuvre for over 60 years. In it, she deals with networks of relationships between numbers and signs and fundamentally with the ambivalence between order and chaos, logic and contradiction. She develops highly complex visualisations of various mathematical-geometric systems, with questions about the magic square, Sanju prime numbers, central perspective or the mathematical foundations of Arabic ornaments. The artist is always concerned with ‘gaining clarity about the immanent structures’ of systems, which she translates into a tangible form through her painting. Her approach becomes clear not least in the work Augustinus sagt… (1981/2010), in which a complex ornamentation is linked to a quote from the famous church scholar and Bishop of Hippo (354-430): ‘Everything has forms because it has numbers in it.’ Mields thus refers to a universal organising principle behind the visible. At the same time, her differentiated repertoire of painterly and thematic shades makes it clear that there are no simple truths and that a systematic organising principle always contains its opposite. As the artist herself aptly summarises: ‘The infinite space – expands’.

In a way, the shadow stands at the beginning of art history... PARTICIPATING ARTISTS (selection): Vito Acconci, David Claerbout, Marlene Dumas, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Jenna Gribbon, Nadia Kaabi-Linke, William Kentridge, Astrid Klein, Farideh Lashai, Johanna von Monkiewitsch, Sophia Pompéry, Gerhard Richter, Regina Silveira, Juergen Staack, Javier Téllez, Kara Walker, Jeff Wall, Tim Noble & Sue Webster.

Art is always closely linked to the lives of artists, their families and art collectors. The new collection presentation in the area of classical modernism traces these paths and stories. While the presentation of selected work provenances makes historical developments and their concrete effects on individual people and their lives comprehensible, exemplary biographies create a lively and multi-faceted picture of the period in which the artworks on display were created. In addition to popular collection highlights by the well-known Rhenish Expressionists, the new presentation shows rarely exhibited works by Marta Worringer, Käthe Kollwitz, Olga Oppenheimer and others.

For the second time, Deutsche Telekom and the Kunstmuseum Bonn are presenting the Human AI Art Award, which they jointly launched in 2024. The price honors artists who work in the field of fine art and cutting-edge technology, especially artificial intelligence, and who are doing pioneering work in this field. This year’s winner is the French artist and filmmaker Nicolas Gourault with his documentary Unknown Label (2023). Based on methodical research, this shows how machines learn to read the world and process it as information through arduous human labor. For his exhibition in the Human AI Art Space in front of the museum Gourault developed his award-winning work into a site-specific video installation. Unknown Label explores the everyday lives of online microworkers, so-called clickworkers, from the Global South. They recreate and categorize images of streets for self-driving cars. The audiovisual installation brings the clickworkers’ working world to life for visitors, revealing the mostly invisible but valuable human labor necessary for training AI systems.

With Gregory Crewdson, the Kunstmuseum Bonn is presenting one of the most important international representatives of narrative photography. He describes his elaborately detailed shots as ‘Single Frame Movies’. Inspired by the visual language of cinema, they seem to condense the plot of an entire film into a single moment. However, the events shown remain inexplicable, the outcome unknown. The months-long production process is also comparable to that of major Hollywood films. The photographs are created with the help of over a hundred people for casting, costume and set design, lighting and technical work. This comprehensive retrospective presents excerpts from all of the artist’s important photo series from the 1980s to the present day. Over 70 works provide an insight into his fascinating visual world, from his early artistic work to his iconic series Twilight and Beneath the Roses to his more recent acclaimed series, which revolve around the decline of American society away from the big metropolises. Crewdson’s uncanny motifs are timeless and at the same time oppressively topical in the face of economic and social crises – not only in the USA.

To mark the 25th anniversary of his death, Kunstmuseum Bonn is dedicating a room within its presentation of the collection to Douglas Swan. The focus is on the works from his Bonn years, supplemented by archive material and accounts of the art scene at the time. The presentation is organised in collaboration with the Douglas Swan Foundation. In addition to works from the collection of the Kunstmuseum Bonn, selected works from the artist’s estate will also be on display. The life and work of Scottish painter Douglas Swan (1930–2000) are closely linked to the city of Bonn: He lived here from the mid-1970s, was part of the local art scene and drew inspiration from the city’s art and music history. The years in Bonn marked the high point of his artistic career. Douglas Swan used painting as a perspective on reality. He explored everyday motifs, such as chairs, painting palettes or Bonn Palace, by repeating, varying and fragmenting them: “I am interested in the double life of visual phenomena; the same object, seen in different ways…”, says Swan. Not only the people, places and art history of Bonn – such as the influence of August Macke – flowed into his works. Swan was also enthusiastic about classical music and transferred its structures into his paintings. Swan’s works defy fixed stylistic categories. Balancing gestural abstraction and figurative echoes to create a highly individual visual language.

For her exhibition, Kerstin Brätsch is transforming the Kunstmuseum Bonn into a dense cosmos of images. With her intensely luminous paintings, the artist draws on the long tradition of abstract art and at the same time expands it. The central starting point of her work is the relationship between painting and the body on a physical, but also on a psychological and social level. In doing so, she combines the individual brushstrokes with digital effects and artisanal techniques. With new productions and works from the past 15 years, the exhibition opens up a broad overview of Kerstin Brätsch’s oeuvre, in which she repeatedly questions painting in a radically new way. Similar to the principle of mimicry in animals, her motifs wander through various media formats. Factors such as light and chance become equal elements in the artistic process. Kerstin Brätsch also regularly engages in collective forms of work, posing fundamental questions about authorship and the subjectivity of painting.