Featured Events in Germany in April, 2025 (May Updated)

From spring 2025, the Gropius Bau will present a comprehensive solo exhibition celebrating the groundbreaking and influential work of artist and activist Yoko Ono. Spanning seven decades of the artist’s powerful, multidisciplinary practice from the mid-1950s to now, YOKO ONO: MUSIC OF THE MIND will trace the development of her innovative work and its enduring impact on contemporary culture. The exhibition brings together over 200 works including instruction pieces and scores, installations, films, music and photography, revealing a radical approach to language, art and participation that continues to speak to the present moment.

After four decades of museum and exhibition operations, the Neue Pinakothek is undergoing fundamental refurbishment. The museum is therefore closed for several years. During this time, selected major works of 19th century painting and sculpture are exhibited in the Alte Pinakothek and in the Sammlung Schack. The selection ranges from classicism and Romanticism to the beginning of modernism. Under the title ‘From Turner to van Gogh’, the 19th century is now being relaunched in a different form. The works of the Romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich, the French Impressionists and the pioneers of modernism from Édouard Manet and Claude Monet to Paul Cézanne and Vincent van Gogh will continue to be on display. Newly exhibited are groups of works by the important Realists Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller and Adolph Menzel, which could not be shown in previous years. One cabinet brings together intimate interior depictions from the Symbolist and fin de siècle eras.

The Weight of the Invisible is a two-part exhibition dedicated to the documentary work of the filmmaker and photographer Wang Bing (b. 1967 in Xi’an, China, lives in Paris). While Wang Bing’s films are epic in their length and their historical and political scope, they are less concerned with grand events than with the small gestures and everyday acts on which the concrete form and substance of human life rests. The artist devotes a special kind of attention to the small, incidental, and marginal – one that knows that existential weight does not necessarily lie in the obvious, but rather in the in-between, in the interstitial, in the enduring, and in what accumulates.

The Berlinische Galerie has devoted over 1000 square metres to presenting its collection. Waiting to be discovered among the roughly 250 works on show are paintings, prints, photographs, architecture and archive materials rarely or never displayed before. Walking around this exhibition is like time travel and takes visitors through Berlin in 17 chapters: the Kaiser’s era, the Weimar Republic, the Nazi dictatorship, the new beginnings after 1945, Cold War in the divided city, and the counter-cultures and unconventional lifestyles that evolved in East and West under the shadow of the Wall. In East Berlin, an alternative art community developed from the late 1970s. In West Berlin from the late 1970s, aggressive art by the “Neue Wilden” placed the divided city back in the international limelight.

For the first time, the exhibition “Five Friends” focuses on a circle of artists who had a decisive influence on post-war art in the fields of music, dance, painting, sculpture and drawing. John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly created a special connection between the artistic genres and media through their intimate exchange.

LAS Art Foundation is pleased to present Pollinator Pathmaker, a living artwork and participatory project conceived by artist Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg. This impactful initiative in interspecies art uses algorithmic technology to generate planting schemes for gardens, computed to support the greatest diversity of pollinating insects possible. It signals a shift toward the post-anthropocentric thinking necessary to face the current climate and biodiversity crises, and toward the non-human aesthetics and experimental formats that pave the way. Ambitious and future-minded, it is exemplary of how art can act as a driver for change, and offer new perspectives on our shared planet. Growing in the forecourt of the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin, the LAS- commissioned garden will be the first edition outside of the UK. LAS has committed to amplifying Pollinator Pathmaker’s impact by undertaking an extensive public campaign, which calls upon local communities, hobby gardeners and activists to get involved in pollinator protection by planting their own version of the artwork – what the artist refers to as DIY Editions – via Ginsberg’s free online tool: www.pollinator.art. Responding to the alarming decline in pollinator populations in recent decades, Ginsberg has worked with horticulturalists, pollinator experts and an AI scientist to devise an algorithmic tool that designs bespoke gardens for pollinating insects. Supported by the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin, the LAS Edition will be customised for Continental Europe, and will feature more than 7,000 plants of 80 different varieties, planted over a 722-square-metre plot.

The International Spy Museum is proud to host this official exhibition of iconic vehicles, all used on-screen by 007 and his many allies and adversaries. While James Bond is a fictional character, he embodies the spirit of many real spies in this museum. These men and women, from around the world, were inspired by over six decades of the Bond film franchise and its enduring cultural influence. Bond In Motion is a celebration of six decades of 007 vehicles. The exhibition features 17 iconic pieces from the EON Productions Archive and the Ian Fleming Foundation. Props, models scale and clips from the films are also on show alongside cars, motorcycles, submarines, and more from the Q Branch garage.

To mark the 100th anniversary of the Griffelkunst-Vereinigung Hamburg e.V., the Hamburger Kunsthalle will show in its Hubertus Wald Forum a broad selection of lithographs, screenprints, etchings, woodcuts, and also photographs and C-prints from the 100 years of the programme, as well as some archival documents. The association has been publishing original graphic editions since 1925, making print series by selected artists available to its members. The works are chosen not according to their formal or thematic coherence but because they provide a repre-sentative idea of the respective artist’s oeuvre based on examples of their graphic work. The Griffelkunst-Vereinigung editions typically showcase established national and international artists alongside lesser-known, often younger artists of diverse nationalities and generations as well as collaborations with printmakers. This extraordinary graphics association today counts 4,500 members throughout Germany. The Hamburger Kunsthalle has been involved from the outset and has presented many of the series in various exhibitions over the years.

DAS MINSK Kunsthaus in Potsdam zeigt im Frühjahr 2025 die Ausstellung IM DIALOG – Sammlung Hasso Plattner: Kunst aus der DDR. Die zweite Sammlungspräsentation setzt auf den Dialog als Herangehensweise an die Kunst der ehemaligen DDR. IM DIALOG zeigt rund 50 Sammlungswerke von Künstler:innen wie Gudrun Brüne, Hartwig Ebersbach, Ulrich Hachulla, Rolf Händler, Bernhard Heisig, Johannes Heisig, Peter Herrmann, Ralf Kerbach, Walter Libuda, Peter Makolies, Wolfgang Mattheuer, Harald Metzkes, Stefan Plenkers, Gerhard Richter, Arno Rink, Cornelia Schleime, Willi Sitte, Gabriele Stötzer, Erika Stürmer-Alex, Werner Tübke und Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt, vorwiegend aus der Zeit von 1966 bis 1992.

The sun at the beach, the scanner at the supermarket checkout or the signal in a fibre optic cable: when light encounters matter – or matter encounters light – exciting things happen!

The first institutional survey exhibition of Shu Lea Cheang (b. 1954, Tainan, Taiwan) takes the taiwanese-american artist’s first feature film Fresh Kill (1994) as a starting point, presenting the artist and filmmaker’s world-building practices and updating works from the past three decades. Cheang moved to New York City in the 1980s, where she joined the vibrant scene of independent cinema and started experimenting with video, live TV, and network technologies. Since the 1990s, her work has challenged and furthered our understanding of digital culture. Cheang anticipated the advance of alternative currencies, investigated gamified societies, and probed biotechnologies. Her works often develop over several years through different stages and media, including video, installation, performance, and various forms of cinema. The exhibition updates works and artefacts into new landscape formations extending through four gallery spaces. Trash appears as a primary theme that leads Cheang’s investigation into the entanglement of biosphere and technosphere. Each gallery is its own world in which internet-based installation and software interaction invite the audience to explore and play.

Marking twenty years since artist, writer and performer Vaginal Davis made Berlin her home, Gropius Bau presents the first comprehensive solo exhibition of her work in Germany. In her expansive oeuvre, punk meets glamour, queer activism meets Black counter-culture and resistance meets desire. Vaginal Davis: Fabelhaftes Produkt features large-scale installations, paintings, video and film works, zines, writing, music and performances, offering an overview of Davis’ practice and artistic collaborations. In the exhibition, the Berlin-based art collective CHEAP presents the installation Choose Mutation, with photographs by Annette Frick. Fabelhaftes Produkt invites you into the universe of Vaginal Davis, populated by literary heroines, mythical figures and real icons.

The exhibition "Colors of Japan – Woodcuts from the Collection of the Bavarian State Library" presents masterpieces of Japanese color woodblock prints from three centuries: from the beginnings of multi-color printing in the mid-18th century to shin-hanga, the so-called "New Prints" of the 20th century. In Japan during the Edo period (1603–1868), these "pictures of the floating world" (ukiyo-e), as these prints are also called, were an integral part of urban life and entertainment culture. Popular motifs included beauties, stage stars, and landscapes. What distinguishes Japanese color woodblock prints is the combination of artistic excellence and craftsmanship. The special stylistic characteristics and diverse cultural and historical references of this art form are evident in works by artists such as Utamaro, Hokusai, Hiroshige, Yoshitoshi, and Hasui. Originating as a commercial art form and produced in large numbers, many prints are now considered works of art of the highest rank.

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Robert Rauschenberg, an important contemporary American artist. The Artists Foundation will present a series of exhibitions, the most special of which is the "Five Friends". The "Five Friends" exhibition focuses for the first time on Rauschenberg and his four friends and collaborators - John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Jasper Johns and Cy Twombly, who are artists who have had a decisive influence in the fields of music, dance, painting, sculpture and drawing after the war. Their creations transcend media, connecting and influencing each other. The exhibition will display more than 150 paintings, scores, stage props, costumes, photographs and documents, and will also host a series of dance performances and concerts to reproduce the dialogue between the works of the five artists.

YOKO ONO: DREAM TOGETHER at Neue Nationalgalerie is an exhibition featuring works from across Ono’s groundbreaking career. The exhibition invites viewers to move beyond passive observation and engage in active participation – both physically and mentally. Often beginning on an individual level, these actions evolve into broader collective efforts, demonstrating the transformative power of communal actions in working toward peace and imagining a different world. The works invite collective actions of repair, healing, cleaning, mending, wishing, imagining, and dreaming. Before entering the exhibition, visitors are invited to engage in a moment of self-reflection through Cleaning Piece (1996). Piles of local river stones are arranged, prompting visitors to reflect on their joys and sorrows. This is followed with instructions to fold paper cranes for peace, gradually filling the exhibition space. In Mend Piece (1966), visitors take part in an act of repair, piecing together broken ceramic cups and “mending with wisdom and love.” The exhibitions central installation, Play It By Trust (1966/1991), features a large chess table where up to 20 players can simultaneously engage in the nearly impossible act of playing with all white chess pieces, challenging them to “play as long as you remember where all your pieces are.”

The exhibition is aimed at gamers of all ages, but also at visitors who have little experience with computer games. The fact that computer games have developed into a leading medium is no longer a daring thesis. The social and aesthetic significance of the interactive and multimedia medium can no longer be overlooked. The computer game has freed itself from its origins as a laboratory experiment and toy and has become "the" medium of digital society, somewhere between pop culture, entertainment and art. With the opening of the exhibition »The World of Games« in the fall of 1997, the ZKM was one of the first art institutions worldwide to give video game culture a permanent public platform in an art context. Since then, the ZKM has repeatedly reshaped the presentation of games in a series of different exhibitions.

Twelve highlights from its premium collection will be guests at the Berlinische Galerie from October 2022. They bring new tones to the permanent in-house exhibition, sparking a conversation with resident works. Sharing collections and jointly making them accessible to the public must become standard museum practice in the future. In this instance, the partnership was prompted by extensive conversion work at the Märkisches Museum, which is scheduled to close for four years in 2023, leaving the foundation Stadtmuseum Berlin without its principal home. To ensure that significant paintings from its collection can remain on display, the idea was born in the two houses of integrating selected works into the permanent exhibition “Art in Berlin 1880-1980”. Early modern art is a particular strength of the Stadtmuseum Berlin holdings. The paintings to be hosted at the Berlinische Galerie are by Max Beckmann, Theo von Brockhusen, Lovis Corinth, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Walter Leistikow, Max Liebermann, Edvard Munch and Lesser Ury. All of them were important figures who enriched the city’s art scene in the early 20th century.

Already 2,000 years ago, the emperors of China had portraits of loyal officials and generals made in order to display them in their palaces. This presentation features depictions of meritorious officers that the Qianlong Emperor (r. 1736–1795) had commissioned for their display in the hall of fame Ziguangge to demonstrate his power and legitimacy. In the 20th century they became spoils of war not one but two times. Located adjacent to the Forbidden City in Beijing, the Ziguangge is a two-storey pavilion. During the reign of the Qianlong Emperor (r. 1736 – 1795), the building was a venue for military rituals and banquets and housed paintings with battle scenes of the imperial military campaigns and portraits of meritorious officers.

Philippe Parreno revolutionised the experience of exhibitions. The French artist transforms galleries into choreographed spaces that follow a script, where all artworks are interconnected while a series of unexpected and interdependent events unfold. Dancers control the exhibition and guide the visitors. A moving wall dances slowly. A tower antenna relays the soundscape of the exhibition and broadcasts stories from a remote land. Its heat is transmitted from blind lamps, its everyday life is screened. Two films fade in and out between flickering circular lights. Mechanical elements rise and fall, generating soundscapes from environmental data, processed and redistributed by the Brain – a customised super-computer. The hard symmetry of the building dissolves, forming a choreography of data, breaths and voices.

While an annex was being built onto August Macke’s former home and studio in the year 2017, a newly conceived interactive, multimedia-based exhibition on the life and work of the artist was installed in the 14 small and intimate rooms distributed throughout the four stories of the house. In these original locations the exhibition relates the fascinating story of Macke's life, his family, his artistic evolution, and his involvement in the art politics of his time - against the background of the Wilhelmine Empire. Surrounded by more than 100 original artworks, numerous memorabilia, furniture, and documents related to August Macke, visitors can immerse themselves in the domestic atmosphere of an important artist family and experience the exciting era of cultural upheaval and radically new attitudes toward art at the end of the 19th century – supported by modern media and presentation technology. Great care has been taken to authentically present the former living quarters on the first floor of the home, whose structure has remained unchanged. The remaining rooms focus on various themes in connection with the life and work of the multi-talented artist and art advocate while illustrating the many different facets of his life.

The Gemäldegalerie is showcasing 60 paintings from the Museum of Western and Eastern Art in Odesa, the famous port city in the south of Ukraine that has in recent years been ravaged by war. The artworks in question were evacuated from the city before the onset of war and transferred to safety in Berlin, where they will be brought into dialogue with paintings from the collections of Berlin’s museums. The large-scale special exhibition, which follows on from a small preview presentation in the spring of 2024, is an extraordinary collaborative project funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media.

Ayoung Kim’s (b. 1979 in Seoul, Korea) first solo exhibition in a German museum spans the most recent years of her artistic practice and explores concepts of time, reality, belonging, and queerness. Using Artificial Intelligence, video, game simulations, and sculpture, Ayoung Kim creates expansive fictional universes governed by their own temporal and spatial laws. Her works are linked by speculative narratives rooted in reality, and viewers become both spectators and first-person players, shaping the story from their perspective.

The Berlin Kupferstichkabinett is home to an impressive collection of modern art, including works by Edvard Munch, Käthe Kollwitz and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. But what is less widely known is that the artists of Der Blaue Reiter also left behind a remarkable legacy of their own. As such, the Kupferstichkabinett is for the very first time dedicating a comprehensive exhibition to the art of Der Blaue Reiter, where it will showcase the museum’s holdings on the basis of 90 artworks organised according to specific themes. These will be complemeneted by a selection of works on loan from the Kunstbibliothek, the Museum Europäischer Kulturen and the Neue Nationalgalerie of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, as well from private Berlin collections.

Images of plants, flowers and birds are besides landscapes and figures among the most popular motifs in painting and graphic arts from Japan. These motifs were also frequently employed as decoration in the design of ceramics, lacquerware and other utensils. Certain blossoms, plants and birds indicate the season and combinations of several elements may hint at the frequent change and passing of time. The tension between regular change and cyclical repetition is particularly palpable in images of the four seasons and makes most of the interplay between limited individual existence and the eternity of nature as depicted for in art. This selection of art works from the museum holdings welcomes a new spring. As we rejoice in the blossoms, we can not help but notice, especially against the ecological challenges of our time, their vulnerability and impermanence.

In recent years, the Ulm Art Association has planned a number of special exhibition series, providing a platform for emerging artists to debut in Germany and presenting cutting-edge creations by internationally renowned artists. Through the "Shoe House Hall" as a cultural carrier, it not only protects historical memory, but also explores the boundaries of perception and future propositions with contemporary art, creating a unique immersive experience for the audience.

This special exhibition, presented in the staircase hall of the Neues Museum, offers a dialogue on the meaning of time, mortality and the connection between past and present. Contemporary art meets historical space, refers to ancient models and offers a modern adaptation of the classical reception of the myth of the Dioscuri, who walk eternally between death and life.

Become one of more than 25,000 runners. The Hamburg Haspa Marathon is the largest spring marathon in Germany and has been held since 1986. The first marathon to have a blue line painted on the road. Hamburg is fast (2:05:30) and the cosmopolitan city (1.8 million inhabitants) lets the joyful atmosphere overflow and takes you to the finish line. The Hamburg Haspa Marathon is a city tour that includes all the highlights of Hamburg. Therefore, we did not straighten every bend and did not deliberately reduce the "climbs". Hamburg is fast (2:05:30), Hamburg is worth seeing, Hamburg is exciting. Run on the blue line

The Superhero Exhibition in Düsseldorf, Germany is a comprehensive exhibition with the theme of superhero culture, covering comic manuscripts, movie props, interactive experiences and art installations. The exhibition provides visitors with an immersive superhero cultural experience through rich exhibits and interactive activities such as virtual reality experiences, Cosplay competitions and guest lectures. It is a great opportunity for superhero fans, families and art and culture enthusiasts of all ages to gain a deeper understanding of the history and development of superheroes. It is a great place to have fun with your kids on weekends~