Art in Berlin 1880 – 1980

For 50 years the Berlinische Galerie has documented the stormy history of art and culture in Berlin. As a city Berlin is caught up in a constant whirl of change and its art scene is always reinventing itself. This turbulent story – from the dawn of modernism around 1900 through to the 1980s – is the subject of our permanent exhibition “Art in Berlin 1880 –1980”.

From April 2025 the presentation from the collection at the Berlinische Galerie will display a fresh diversity across a space of more than 1000 square metres. The 50th anniversary is an opportunity to tell new stories about how and why these works found their way into our museum. Moreover, some chapters in the exhibition have been entirely redesigned. There is even a dedicated room called “Hannah Höch: Homage” where visitors can get to know the famous Dada artist more closely. Roughly 250 works await discovery – paintings, sculptures, prints, drawings, photographs, architectural designs and archive documents, some of them never or rarely shown before. Apart from a selection drawn from the first hundred artworks to arrive at the Berlinische Galerie, we have included artists who have been unjustly forgotten and showcased some new acquisitions.

Visitors are taken on a time journey through Berlin in 17 chapters: the era of the Kaisers, the Weimar Republic, Nazi dictatorship, new beginnings after 1945, Cold War in the divided city and alternative lifestyles in both East and West which sprang up in the shadow of the Wall. From the late 1970s, non-conformist subcultures appeared in the art scene of East Berlin, while in West Berlin the Neue Wilden placed the partitioned city back in the international limelight.

Please log in to download high resolution images.

Login
Accreditation

If you have any technical problems when downloading images for print, try logging in from a different browser. If the technical problems persist, please contact: presse@berlinischegalerie.de

 

Back