With this exhibition, the Kunstmuseum invites visitors to rediscover its own collection of modern and contemporary art and to explore its relevance for current discourses. Based on August Macke's iconic works from the legendary Tunis trip in 1914, which he undertook together with Paul Klee and Louis Moilliet, the show opens up an exchange between artworks from different times and places. The exhibition reflects on the importance of travel as an inspiration and artistic tool as well as concepts such as intercultural exchange, cultural appropriation and global responsibility.

Collection works by Sigmar Polke, Michael Buthe and Joseph Beuys enter into a dialog with loans from contemporary artists such as Haleh Redjaian, Niadia Kaabi-Linke and Manaf Halbouni. Works from the Sammlung der Moderne are complemented by extensive material from the August Macke Archive (Münster) and travel photographs by Gabriele Münter.

In a way, the shadow is at the beginning of art history. In the ancient tradition of Pliny the Elder, it is the daughter of the potter Butades who traces the shadow outline of her lover's head with a charcoal pencil, thus creating the first image. The famous allegory of the cave by the Greek philosopher Plato, in turn, distinguishes the shadow images in the dark cave that obscure reality from the bright light of knowledge and thus literally separates the shadowy existence from the truly illuminated one. The dubious, potentially sinister aspect accompanied the shadow for centuries before Romanticism discovered its positive dimensions and linked the shadow with the psyche. In Adelbert von Chamisso's fairy tale Peter Schlemihl, for example, the loss of the shadow is equated with the loss of the soul. Even though shadows have played a role in the repertoire of painting since the early modern period, it was not until the 19th century and the invention of photography and film that they became an essential pictorial element.

Based on around 40 international positions, the exhibition traces the emancipation of the shadow as an image-producing, yet always media-reflexive theme within contemporary art for the first time in a German museum. It examines the spectrum of shadow worlds, ranging from the existential to the threatening to the political. The shadow is where the absent and the present meet. It symbolically and immaterially refers to the existence of the material world and at the same time also contains its extinction. It belongs to the body, from which it is at the same time always at a distance. It is a trace that, like photography, functions as an index and at the same time is a projection surface that claims its own reality. In this context, the shadow can be read on the one hand as a metaphor for the crisis of the subject, but also as an important indicator of a reality beyond the superficially visible.

Participating artists (selection):

Vito Acconci, David Clerbout, Marlene Dumas, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Jenna Gribbon, Nadia Kaabi-Linke, William Kentridge, Astrid Klein, Farideh Lashai, Gerhard Richter, Regina Silveira, Javier Téllez, Kara Walker, Jeff Wall, Sue Webster/Tim Noble.

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 multifaceted 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.

Deutsche Telekom and the Kunstmuseum Bonn are presenting the Human AI Art Award for the second time in 2025. With prize money of 10,000 euros and a two-month exhibition, the award promotes innovative artistic approaches in the age of digital transformation. The annual award recognizes artists who work in the field of tension between fine art and state-of-the-art technology, especially artificial intelligence, and who are pioneers in this field. Following the successful premiere in 2024, when the US artist Lauren Lee McCarthy was honored by a top-class jury for her work Lauren, the winner of the 2025 award will be announced at the beginning of the year.

A special highlight of the award is the pavilion designed especially for the Human AI Art Award by the agency Meiré und Meiré, which will be located outside the Kunstmuseum Bonn for the duration of the exhibition. The award-winning artistic work will be presented here. The temporary architecture offers the nominated works a contemporary setting and the public a place to immerse themselves in the interactions between art and technology. Admission is free of charge.

With Gregory Crewdson (born 1962 in Brooklyn, New York), the Kunstmuseum Bonn is presenting one of the most important international representatives of staged photography. His elaborately detailed photographs evoke the abysmal in the midst of the everyday familiar: In monumental format, the photographs show the intrusion of the uncanny and mysterious into the supposedly ideal world of US suburbs. People act as if in a trance, mysterious lights appear in the night sky and crop circles in manicured lawns.

This comprehensive retrospective presents excerpts from all of the artist's important photo series from the 1980s to the present day. More than 70 works provide an insight into his fascinating visual world, from his early artistic work to his best-known series Twilight and Beneath the Roses to his most recent works, which revolve around the decline of American society away from the major metropolitan centers. Crewdon's uncanny motifs are timeless and at the same time of oppressive topicality in the face of economic and social crises - not only in the USA.

A cooperation with the Albertina, Vienna.

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. She combines the individual brushstroke with digital effects and artisanal techniques. With new productions and works from the past 15 years, the exhibition provides a broad overview of Kerstin Brätsch's work, in which she constantly questions painting anew.

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. By regularly engaging in targeted collective forms of work, Kerstin Brätsch also poses fundamental questions about authorship and the subjectivity of painting in order to reposition it in the art discourse. The exhibition is complemented by collaborative projects by DAS INSTITUT (with Adele Röger), Sergei Tcherepnin, KAYA (with Debo Eilers) and Wibke Tiars. 

Since 2007, her works have been shown in international exhibitions, including repeatedly at the Venice Biennale. Her works are represented in important private and public collections, and the artist has received prestigious awards such as the Helen Frankenthaler Award for Painting, the Peill Prize of the Günther Peill Foundation, the August Macke Prize for Painting and the Munch Award of the Munchmuseet in Oslo.