The Ludwig Galerie shows an overview of the work of the celebrated Magnum photographer born in 1928. Dogs and children, groups, naked people, museums and landscapes; nobody is safe from his tongue-in-cheek, humorous angle of vision.
"I am serious about not being serious" states Erwitt about himself. People and animals are the focus of his work. His travels took him all over the world, and the documentary photos still characterise our view of historical occurrences to the present day.
Represented at Edward Steichen's legendary photography exhibition The Family of Man in 1955 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the American with Russian parentage also influenced fashion and advertising photography in addition to creative photography and numerous documentary reports.
In cooperation with Magnum Photos.

As one of the leading protagonists of pop art, Roy Lichtenstein worked particularly in the poster field and in this genre, he produced more than 70 drafts over 35 years. The presentation which features his entire designs provides a total overview of the output of this unusual artist.
His work unfolds before the observer from the early years of comic scenes, through a barely physical shape language inspired by art deco, to the later serene landscapes. The function of the posters ranges from advertising his own exhibitions at the New York Leo Castelli gallery, through implemented designs such as the cover for "Tintin [Tim und Struppi] in the new world" to political posters for Unicef together with Andy Warhol, Keith Haring and others.
Apart from his personal concepts, the exhibition is rounded off by further posters with reproductions of paintings and drawings that were produced during Lichtenstein's life.

The so-called Leuchter- or Lüsterweibchen from the Peter and Irene Ludwig Collection is the centre of focus of this very high quality one-room exhibition. Assumed to have been created around 1540 in Northern Switzerland, the piece stems either from the Rapperswil Town Hall or else once hung in the residency of Thüring Göldlin and Margareta Muntprat, the original commissioners. Surrounded by the proud antlers of a stag of fourteen points, the figure bears the coat of arms of the pair.
Many loans in the form of further Leuchterweibchen, sculptures, paintings and graphic works serve to illustrate the context of the piece and elaborate the unique dual structure of both art and proximity to nature that characterises this highly wondrous genre.

Janosch is one of the most popular and best known picture book illustrators in Germany. With over 300 published childrens' books, both young and old people are on intimate terms with his tigers, lions and bears. He tames these beasts of the wild, transforming them into appealing animals for home and hearth. Tiger and Bear have not only shown us that Panama can be found on our own doorsteps, but also how important friendship is.

In an extensive exhibition encompassing many more than 130 works, the Ludwig Galerie presents the graphic artist with original watercolours, gouache paintings and drawings. The designs show just how tightly knit images are with their accompanying narrative. In this way grown-ups are given an insight into the artistic processes of the internationally renowned childrens' author equipped with a magically creative pencil, and children are cast adrift into the wonderful storyteller's world of fantasy.

In this unusual presentation, Ludwig Galerie Schloss Oberhausen shows an extensive exhibition focusing on the artistic approach to the table as a theme of art, within the framework of the year of the Capital of Culture 2010. Internationally based, highly qualitative pieces from the collection of Peter and Irene Ludwig form the starting point. A panopticon of tables unfolds unusual perspectives. Antique vessels, medieval (altar) tables and still lives from the 17th century are confronted with tendencies from the 20th and 21st centuries. Together, next to and against each other, the positions provide evidence of widely differing approaches. Culturally historic investigations into table culture do not take place but rather a rendering visible of inner contexts, that on the surface at least often present us with highly diverse appearances.

The table as an everyday object serves here for the first time as a medium for the presentation of artistic approaches that sometimes avail us of wide distances and at other times with surprising proximities. While the chair is and has always been a supreme object of design, the table on the other hand tends to assume a more servile, incidental role. And yet it gathers much around it and indeed on top of it. The still life is the only genre that has given the table a leading role. Apart from that it is perhaps in particular the sense of casualness in its presence that serves to emphasise its existence. This is the first time that an exhibition has been dedicated to the theme of the table in a cross-genre fashion, and with the help of masterpieces from the Ludwig Collection embarks on a search for inner structure and the essence of fundamental possibilities.

The array of exponents ranges from decorative, finely worked porcelain tableware from the Ludwig Collection to Renato Guttoso's Funerary Banquet that draws its inspiration from Picasso and his world. Campbell soup cans belong on the table as much as the large antique Skyphos and the Attic eye bowl. Ritual activities (altar tables) are part of the exhibition as are general, everyday aspects. David Hockney allows us a glimpse of his studio, and Albrecht Dürer presents us with the study chamber of Saint Jerome.
Not all tables however are well laid, as displayed by the triad of Joseph de Bray's fasting still life from 1657 acclaiming pickled herring, Picasso's Simple Feast from 1904 and Günter Weseler's Table with Object for Breathing from the 1970's. And the exhibition also eminently demonstrates the harmonious unison of historical cutlery with New Objectivity photography.

'On Tables' is the exhibition of art and as such the primary exhibition of the Ludwig Galerie Schloss Oberhausen for the Ruhr Capital of Culture 2010.

The continuously evolving territory in which coal and steel formed a richly individual cultural landscape over a span of nearly 200 years is characterised by a unique form of garden art. Already in the Baroque period, parks and gardens of the highest artistic order (Borbeck) were established, and the English landscape gardening style still bequeaths to us its legacy (Herten). The Wilhelminian style and the Reform Movement with their countless public and private gardens create a highly diverse landscape of decorative greenery that characterise the identity of the region to this day.

This uniquely green territory where cabbage (reality and use of) and cypresses (dreams and the exquisiteness of) come together, reflects the ever changing, conflicting relationship between the social and cultural processes of industrial transformation. Present times continue to determine this process.

The various accretions of time in terms of garden culture and in relation to the rapidly changing Emscher valley can be seen in particular in the Kaisergarten, the largest exhibition exponent, bordering directly onto the Ludwig Galerie in Schloss Oberhausen. High quality paintings and sculptures, historic garden furniture and designs, as well as glorious flowerage once again given the kiss of life allow for the first time in an art museum a comprehensive overview of the history of gardening in the Emscher and Ruhr regions.

The Ludwig Galerie and the Emschergenossenschaft again come together for the exhibition and catalogue. The show has been made possible with the cooperation of the NRW-Stiftung Naturschutz, Heimat- und Kulturpflege together with the State of North-Rhine Westphalia as a part of the Capital of Culture 2010. Further partners are the Art Historical Institute of Bochum University and Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf and the regional association Regionalverband Ruhr.

The exhibition is given an international backdrop with a congress dedicated to contemporary garden design and landscape gardening as part of the yearly congress of the Parks Agency directors at the German Association of Cities and Towns from 07.-09. May 2010.

Big, knobbly, potato-like noses or Knollennasen are his hallmark, and the observing of (homo)erotic togetherness his content: Ralf König (*drum rolls, fanfare*) presents original drawings from his graphic stories in Ludwig Galerie Schloss Oberhausen.

Ludwig Galerie is home to his first major, comprehensive exhibition. The recipient of international awards (his comics have been translated into 15 languages), his work is now the subject of an overview of his creative output with a major show of original art.
'Most desired men' and 'Pretty babies ' frolic through his narratives, making Ralf König not only the most important German comic artist but also one of the most distinguished popular figures of the gay scene.
Born in 1960 in Westphalia near Soest, he grew up in Catholic surroundings, was keen on telling stories as a child, became a carpenter and then studied at the Art Academy in Düsseldorf. 'Der bewegte Mann' (int. title 'Most desired man') in 1996 established his wider popularity with an increasingly heterosexual public. His comic art has been filmed and also successfully presented in the form of puppet theatre. König has repeatedly reverted to classic literary sources of inspiration such as 'Lysistrata', freely adapted from Aristophanes, or 'Jago', loosely based on Shakespeare. In 'Kondom des Grauens' (int. title 'Killer condom') he parodies the figure of the sleuth Philipp Marlowe. He also approaches the theme of Aids in the form of Superparadise Nebenwirkungen (Superparadise side-effects). And he packaged his own (short) biography into a cheekily drawn comic in 1993 with aplomb.

In his two latest books 'Prototyp' and 'Archetyp' he affords an insight into the potato-nosed story of the Creation as well as the goings on in Noah's Ark. He tackles the theme of religion and the Bible in his own highly unconventional manner. He has expressed himself critically to the Islamic cartoon controversy and has taken a stand for the general freedom of opinion and the press. For his stance he was awarded the Max-and-Moritz Prize in Erlangen in 2006. His position on the advisory committee of the Giordano-Bruno Foundation also demonstrates his dedication to a peaceful and equal co-existence for mankind.
As well as his comic strips, large-format works from Ralf König are also shown, many of which were created especially for the Oberhausen exhibition. The show, enabling the Ludwig Galerie to underline and further increase its importance as a central exhibition location for the comic and caricature genre, promises exciting insights into the (erotic) world of the noses. Ralf König is on-site in person on a number of occasions (see the calendar), allowing his fans to get to know him in real life.

Georg Baselitz, Markus Lüpertz and A. R. Penck are unarguably some of the most important protagonists of painting in Germany. In the last decades their artistic worlds have characterised and continue to characterise the visual arts far beyond the borders of Germany. Peter and Irene Ludwig accumulated early works on paper from all three artists for their collection that allow viewers to follow the development enabling Baselitz, Lüpertz and Penck to discover their themes and forms.
At the close of the 1950s Baselitz turned his back on gestural forms to address his gaze to figurative art. The phase is characterised by people and individual parts of the human body with almost organic appearances. It closes with the heroes and 'New Types', achieving a programmatic zenith with the 'Großen Freunden' (Big Friends). In the late 1960s Baselitz began to rotate his pictorial motifs. The drawings clarify this process, in particular with the first turned objects from the 'Wald auf dem Kopf' (Wood upside down).
With the dithyramb in 1964 Markus Lüpertz introduced a form to art that because of its decidedly physical effect arouses representational associations but cannot however be designated as being representational. His drawings point the way. Further groups clarify the development of his well known pictorial objects. Coats, helmets, snails, dragons and fish populate the works on paper, the 'style images' are denoted by their own innate form.
The development of the A. R. Penck drawing system is also documented by the array of drawings selected from the Ludwig Collection. Already with early system paintings Penck showed his interest in drawing as a method of communicating information. From 1968 he attempted to develop a drawing system in the 'Standart' images that corresponded to scientific systems in relation to its unambiguity, combining signal character with a call to action in the way of traffic signs. With his move to West Germany in 1980 his images gained in hindsight political dimensions.
The exhibition in the Kleines Schloss brought into being in cooperation with the Ludwig Forum for International Art and the Ludwig Foundation in Aachen affords for the first time a view of the resources of international applied art from the Ludwig Collection taken from Eastern and Western Europe as well as from Asia and Cuba.

17 May to 14 June 2009

Burkhard Held painted boxers for a long time. The canvas became his inescapable boxing ring. Concentrated tension, brutality and extreme physical presence produced paintings that were filled to bursting with individual heads. These FACESCAPES are no mere reproductions of fights but are brought about more through the pugnacious crashing together of the innate powers of colour.
With time though these stricken physiognomies decamped to distribute themselves across the canvas as loose shreds of face or applied streaks of colour. Rips and hard edges emerged. At first the boxer portraits gave way almost imperceptibly to bashful landscapes, leading on to massively portrayed, impressive mountain depictions.
The 'Salvage' exhibition brings together paintings from the past five years and shows the impressive transformation from colour-saturated boxer portraits to heads that dissolve more and more into landscapes, until the final, towering mountain masses. Burkhard Held has distanced himself with confidence from the limitations of the boxing ring towards a style of plein air painting upon canvas.

Crosscuts – the class of Burkhard Held at the University of the Arts in Berlin.
Eight former and present students confront their master at the University of the Arts in Berlin in a self-confident and wilful way. The 'Querschläge / Crosscuts' exhibition offers a rare chance to experience the exciting atmosphere of dispute at close range within a painting class with all its jagged edges, sympathies and elements of rebellion. After all, it cannot be a matter of every student emulating his tutor in a slave-like fashion. In a highly diverse and painterly way, Mohamad-Said Baalbaki, Josephine Behlke, Markus Gely, Natalia Korotyaeva, Regina Nieke, Min Young Park, Hyun-Jung Ryu and Johanna Silbermann have acquired completely individual signature styles. And they all profit from the stance of their teacher without however feeling the need to imitate him. The exhibition shows just how exciting it can be to search for your own footing in the world of art: crosscuts meet their target!

"An eighth of a second seems to me to be the blink of the eye of classical photography," says Jim Rakete, one of the most important of German photographers. He shoots his portraits with a plate camera, a technique taken from the dawning era of photography. The photographer from Berlin allows a glimpse into the worlds of film and music, art and dancing, literature and politics.
'Familiar Strangers' show images the names of which read like a who's-who of public life. For Rakete it is important that his protagonists are devoid of make-up in order to capture them as real people. Heino Ferch relaxes with a cup of coffee, Christiane Paul in the last weeks of pregnancy at a busy railway station, and Helmut Schmidt with his mandatory cigarette. The artist Jörg Immendorff takes a whiff of a clove with a melancholy gesture.

The music scene that was significantly defined by Jim Rakete as a manager is not only represented by Nena and Ulla Meinecke but also by Silbermond and Wir sind Helden. Some of the rare colour photographs showing Nadja Auermann and Polina Semionova illuminate this area of his work. Rakete's concealed preference for rabbits is not only seen on the back of the volume of photography bearing the same title.

Ludwig Galerie Schloss Oberhausen displays around 130 of these impressive portraits. The images represent a quick run through of the decisive people from various walks of life (music, the cinema, politics, sport and art) with a slowly operating plate camera, according to Jim Rakete. A homage to silver photography was the result, the era of which is finally coming to a close. In order to give an impression of the chaste and unadorned atmosphere of work required for this type of photography, the exhibition features a studio situation showing the tried-and-true plate camera, the crumpled background taken from some of the photos and some original photographic plates.
The film portrait of the artist Jim Rakete by Claudia Müller focuses on the photographer in detail. She accompanied him throughout 2007 for MA VIE and recorded during five days of shooting just how long an eighth of a second really can be.

The impression of man has undergone an intense metamorphosis since the Modern Movement. Avante-garde artists grappled with innovative forms of representation and explore new paths. The exhibition illuminates this phenomenon. Beginning with Edvard Munch's early Madonna masterpiece, the arc is spanned across to the pop icons of Andy Warhol.

The dancing figures of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner develop their own irregularly convoluted rhythms, and the figures of Brücke artists such as Heckel, Schmidt-Rottluff, Pechstein and Müller differentiate forms of representation. Nolde, Kandinsky, Dix and Beckmann similarly lead viewers into a transformed conception of man, as do the lascivious nudes of Egon Schiele.

Picasso creates new forms of the ideal of man in leaps and bounds, ranging from the Simple Feast and the harlequins to his work dictated by the prismatic influence of Cubism and the experimental white line prints. Various portraits of his partners in life allow a glimpse into the sphere of his private relationships.

The pop icons of Andy Warhol mark a stylistic termination in the representation of man during the 20th century. In addition to tickets, flowers and cows the figure itself dominates as an object of art worthy of view. Warhol has had a crucial influence on how we perceive icons of the screen such as Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor and Jane Fonda.

With partly large-format colour prints, proofs and one-offs the exhibition documents the transformation of the figure to become an icon. The Ludwig Galerie displays the representation of man in the 20th century over three storeys.

Amsterdam, Barcelona, Manchester, Leipzig and the Ruhr region: since 1989 Thomas Wolf has been photographing the exciting process of transformation in urban development that has taken place since the end of the Industrial Age in these European cities and regions. The metropolitan areas have not simply torn down and disposed of their civic heritage from the Industrial Age but have transformed, redefined and reinvented it according to the demands of the 21st century. In particular the giant, disused industrial areas and fallow land have become new centres for a thriving urban existence into which the old industrial architecture has been integrated. Wolf's images are not traditional architectural portraits documenting municipal highlights but urban landscapes in panoramic format that show how a new form of life emerges from and out of the old.
To show the photographic work of Thomas Wolf in an exhibition in the Ludwig Galerie Schloss Oberhausen is an obvious step, because since the International Construction Exhibition in the Emscher Park and with the major Emscher renovation project, the Ruhr region is deemed to be one of the main urban centres of Europe, with structural transformation in an advanced state.

There are photographic images from Thomas Hoepker that have been implanted in our visual memory: the famine in India (1951), lepers in Ethiopia (1963), the boxing idol Muhammad Ali (1966), the recruiting of U.S. marines (1970) and New York on 11 September 2001. These photographs were not intended merely to illustrate text but were part of exciting multi-page picture series that sourced their vitality solely from the visual expressiveness of photography.
What we notice in Hoepker's images today more than all else is the 'human glance'. He is no photographic journalist seeking the sensational report but an inquisitive, highly sensitive observer. Hoepker's pictures are seen in the category of 'human interest photography' along with names such as Dorothea Lange, Robert Frank, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Capa, the photographic style of which has been decidedly influenced by the legendary MAGNUM photographic agency, of which Hoepker has been a member since 1989.
Thomas Hoepker's retrospective documents not only the curiosity and intensity with which he confronts the human dramas he witnesses throughout the world, but also how he has always searched for the most suitable form of expression in his array of photographic tasks.
The exhibition was prepared together with Thomas Hoepker and in cooperation with MAGNUM Photos Paris and the photographic museum in the Stadtmuseum, Munich.

Audacious taboo-breaking, caustic derision, irrepressible carnal desire and Baroque sensual delight are the hallmarks of the Austrian satirist Manfred Deix. His characters caricature 'healthy popular sentiment' as being obese, blown up and downright mean. Politicians, policemen, the clergy, pederasts, perverts, prostitutes, tourists, foreigners, the unemployed and neo-nazis are all to be found in his bursting cosmos of images.
When the exhibition illustrations are looked at his people depicted on paper are seen at first to be monstrous incarnations of his fantasy until it is surprisingly seen later on that people on the street really do look like Deix's figures. "The satire of our reality today," says Deix, "beats the power of imagination of a caricaturist hands down." He therefore does not see himself as being one who 'exaggerates' but one who 'touches up' or 'belittles' the daily satire of everyday life, and a graphic artist who aims to 'playfully spread a touch of beauteousness among the people'.
200 original Deix drawings are put on display by the Ludwig Galerie, including his new Arnold Schwarzenegger biography 'The Naked Truth'.
The exhibition was created in cooperation with the Caricature Museum in Krems and the Wilhelm Busch Museum in Hanover.

Wilhelm Busch, thanks to his legendary comic series Max and Moritz, the pious Helene, Plisch and Plum, Hans Huckebein, Fips the monkey and others, was the man who really taught pictures how to run. The thing that fascinates us with Winsor McCay's 'Little Nemo' comics and the early 'Silly Sinphonies' films from Disney, the world of moving images, was in effect invented by Wilhelm Busch. He attempted to distance himself from the attitude of artists before him trying to express themselves within one frame, and told his pictorial narrative in a series of images with a compelling sense of drama that drew viewers into the activity: focal points and perspectives change constantly, part complete views and part close-up, an obsession with detail and the sheer violence of his dynamic line design.
His painterly work was also modern. Franz Marc described Wilhelm Busch as the very first 'Futurist', as with his furious brushwork he extracted all sense of inner stability from his paintings, transforming them into a conglomerate of colour imbued with motion.
His images do not idealise, but caricature, deform, distort and spoof ideal forms, subjecting what is good to ridicule. 'Heart Pain and Nose Ache' documents the dependence of caricature upon malice, spitefulness and malicious joy.
As well as masterpieces from Wilhelm Busch, works are also on display from Callot, Carracci, Gillray, Rowlandson, Hogarth, Grandville, Toepffer, Dirks, McCay, Disney, Heine, Flora, Pericoli, Searle, Sempé, Topor, Ungerer and others.
Exhibition cooperation partners: the Wilhelm Busch Museum, Hanover

Napoleon, both genius and despot, polarises our thoughts until today: for some he was a genius that shook up Europe, spreading his ideas of the rights of man throughout the continent, and for others he was a power obsessed, warmongering despot who aimed to subjugate the whole world to his ideas.
The exhibition documents both idealising representations and vicious caricature with masterpieces of both high and trivial art. Never before have the most important artists of their time admired and hated a personality so passionately as they did Napoleon.
The exhibition traces the progress of Napoleon from the grasping of power until his exile on the island of St. Helena. The starting point is a richly productive satirical presentation from the early days of caricature in Europe, critically documenting his path in life. The distorted picture only becomes understandable when seen in the context of the ideal image, hence the exhibition displays caricatures set against impressive examples of Napoleon's systematically programmed cult of dictatorship with portraits, busts, death masks and devotional objects. Diametrically opposed artistic attitudes come together to communicate a fascinating insight into the highly contradictory personality of the dictator.
The exhibition is a cooperative work together with the Wilhelm Busch Museum Hanover, the Napoleon Museum Schloss Arenenberg am Bodensee and others.

The catalogue can be ordered at a price of 12.50 euros:

A panorama gallery of the Kleines Schloss hosts a unique Christmas nativity scene from the Ludwig Collection as part of a presentation distributed through various rooms. The nativity scene tells of the various stages of the Christmas story with a Baroque finery and glorious illumination.
The Christmas manger of the Ludwig Collection is the highlight of the Bamberg nativity scene: a Baroque large-scale presentation from the 17th century with over 450 figures. The home of the scene is Rottenburg on the Neckar River. Generations have contributed to depicting the Holy story in a wonderfully lucid form, and the figures, robed in fine Baroque brocade, appear to be on a theatre stage. The Christmas story is unfolded within an Oriental landscape on several levels. The Proclamation of Christ, the choir of the Heavenly Host, the shepherds on their way to Bethlehem, the Birth of Christ, the Presentation in the Temple and the Journey of the Three Wise Kings from the Orient can all be admired.
The exhibition originated in cooperation with the Ludwig Collection in Bamberg and was supplemented by loans from the Schnütgen Museum, Cologne.

The catalogue can be ordered for 13 euros:

The exhibition unfolds to the visitor the fascinating diversity in the relationship between nature and art. Stones from two billion years ago and the photographic work of Albert Renger-Patzsch, Alfred Ehrhardt und Karl Blossfeldt demonstrate that nature and art are both imbued to the same degree with the powers of creative form.
'Living Stones' commences with a cultural and historical prologue: a medieval rock crystal crucifix and crystal quartz, ancient Chinese scholars' rocks and bizarrely shaped stones. The fusioning of eminent works of art with precious stones from the Ludwig Collection renders perceivable the differences between the European and Far Eastern philosophies of nature.
The late work from Albert Renger-Patzsch titled 'Gestein' (Stone) with 64 photographs shows the never-ending circle of creation and decay that has been occurring for billions of years – the phases of growth in the rocks of the Earth. The photography of Renger-Patzsch, Blossfeldt and Ehrhardt form an exciting contrast to the unique stone findings and crystals. The exhibition presents the stones exquisitely as creative forms of Mother Nature and as also forms of art. When viewers begins to enter into the consciousness of the stones with all their beauty they commence to tell their story: each one has its own biography, for example the large iron nickel meteorite that plunged to Earth over 30,000 years ago and that originates from the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter and originated 4.5 billion years ago together with the solar system.
The exhibition originated in cooperation with the Ruhr Museum in Essen, the Ann and Jürgen Wilde Collection, Zülpich, and the Alfred Ehrhardt Foundation, Cologne. Donors of the works of cultural heritage are the Museum for East Asian Art, Cologne, Museum Schnütgen, Cologne and the Suermondt Ludwig Museum, Aachen.

The catalogue can be ordered at a price of 24.50 euros from:

The exhibition shows 150 outstanding works of placative art taken from the 19th and 20th centuries that cite a diverse array of flowers, plants, nature and landscape experiences as their subjects. Leading poster artists such as Alphonse Mucha, Ludwig Hohlwein, Uwe Loesch and Klaus Staeck have created important works of applied art that render visible the transformation of nature across more than one hundred years.
In the realm of poster art, dreams of gardens have found a source of fascinating visual expression since the 19th century. While applied artists were mainly inspired in the Wilhelminian age with the visual language of painting, in the time of Art Nouveau they transformed the poster medium into a spectacularly organic form of decoration dominated by the rhythms of nature. In the eras of Art Déco and New Objectivity the poster as a form of art then found its own methods for expression: large, coloured surfaces, eye-catching lines and succinct text melt and fuse in the masterpieces of placative art to pictorial organisms bursting with tension and infused with monumental, suggestive force.
The exhibition though is not only interesting in terms of art history but also in relation to cultural history. The posters demonstrate the fundamental transformations in our perception of nature that have taken place in the last century and our efforts to recapture these, ranging from exotic displays of flowers, garden arbours and homely gardens to the municipal park movement, the greenage of urbanity and the renaturation of landscapes.
The exhibition from the Peter Drecker Collection is supplemented with loans from the German Poster Museum in Essen.

The catalogue can be ordered for 17.50 euros from:

The exhibition displays 150 photographic masterpieces collected by Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908 – 2004) in his last years in the form of a 'small-scale retrospective'. We come face to face with many of the familiar images from France, Mexico, Spain, North America, Russia, India and China that make us conscious of just how strongly this photographer defined the image of man in the 20th century.
The unique essence of this exhibition is that photographs are shown for the first time in the Ludwig Galerie on an equal footing with his portrait, nude and landscape drawings; in the last three decades of his life Henri Cartier-Bresson only photographed occasionally, applying most of his creative strength to pencil and paper. He himself merely saw a change of the craft, as the activity of drawing for him was seen to be on the same level as photography, demanding maximum awareness and concentration in order to capture the exciting vibrancy of life.
Films have been integrated into the exhibition in which Henri Cartier-Bresson talks about his abstruse desire to 'penetrate the living hearts of people with his camera and drawing utensils and to capture this decisive moment of contact'. In addition many of the legendary original magazines can be seen (LIFE, Paris Match, stern and DU) that first published Cartier-Bresson's photo series since 1937.
The exhibition was realised in cooperation with MAGNUM Photos Paris.

The catalogue can be ordered at a price of 39.80 euros from:

Peter and Irene Ludwig collected high quality works in the 1970s in equal measure from important artists hailing from both West and East Germany: Altenbourg, Baselitz, Beuys, Ebersbach, Fetting, Grützke, Heisig, Immendorff, Kiefer, Klapheck, Lüpertz, Mattheuer, Metzkes, Penck, Polke, Richter, Schultze, Sitte, Stelzmann, Stötzer, Tübke, Vostell and others.
'German Paintings' shows for the first time works from the collection at eye level: a German-to-German contention and amalgamation of images. The exhibition attempts to give a concrete form to the often quite grim painterly debate of recent years with the coming together of the paintings. It happens to be a specific peculiarity of art that its richness and fascination is only experienced by observation of original works. For us to perceive their differences and also indeed their familiarities demands a need for such images to come together more often than has been the case in recent times.
The exhibition draws on works of Medieval art from the Ludwig Collection as well as Expressionism and New Objectivity from other collections in order to excite the perception of the multifaceted historical roots of German-German art to an order in excess of that until now.
The objects of art from the Ludwig Collection are on loan from: Museum Ludwig Cologne, Ludwig Forum for International Art Aachen, Suermondt Ludwig Museum Aachen, Museum of Modern Art Foundation Ludwig Vienna, Ludwig Museum Budapest, Museum Ludwig in the Russian State Museum St. Petersburg, Germanic National Museum Nuremberg, Museum Ludwig Coblenz and others.

The catalogue can be ordered at a price of 29.50 euros at:

The exhibition documents the transformation of the Ruhr region from a former coal and steel territory to become a unique landscape of bridges, with 90 monumental photographs and films by Thomas Wolf. Nearly 10,000 bridges form a tight network of tracks, conduits and waterways. A system reminiscent of Venice and Amsterdam, but here bridges interfuse not merely with a city but a complete region. With the demise of coal and steel, large parts of the system were rendered idle. The economic standstill was seen to be a chance for the inhabitants, and the network of traffic routes and bridges was not torn out but rather opened up for the benefit of the population. In the 1990s the IBA Emscherpark, the Regionalverband Ruhr and the Emschergenossenschaft began to create a net of trails for cyclists and hikers upon the closed-down tracks and dikes. The construction of new bridges and the refurbishment of existing ones during this process became a symbol for transforming the landscape from dereliction and mutilation to one that has become perceptible and accessible again. Routes for people were created from routes for profit.
The new bridges designed by the architects Schlaich, Polonyi, Otto Frei, Foster, Hegger and Schleiff, Wörzberger, Pahl and Weber-Pahl among others connect not only the landscape but also beckon people to stay, to linger.

The catalogue can be ordered at a price of 24.50 euros from:

He is deemed to be the master of shock: the Austrian painter Gottfried Helnwein shatters taboos to confront viewers with his hyper realistically painted visions. The central theme of the one hundred mostly large format works of Helnwein is the child. Not as being innocent and lovable but as an object of injury, disrobement, humiliation and abuse. The ability of mankind to suffer, the most shocking motif in the history of art, leads us into the heady images of Helnwein and the destiny of a child void of pity. The harrowing factor of his method of representation is that he destroys those clichés of a happy childhood so dear to us, casting observers into the role of confidants, witnesses and accomplices of a glaringly blatant injustice.
The viewer can hardly cast his eyes away from the mesmerising quality of the Helnwein images, as within them meticulous attention to photographic detail fuses with the inner illumination reminiscent of Old Master paintings to create an almost magical surface effect. This inner source of light permeates the figures and objects, appearing to lift them up and transcend them in a way that reminds us of devotional images. Although what we then see in the works are not Holy scenes but rather apocalyptic nightmares.
Few artists have explored the area of conflict to be found between painting and photography as deeply as Helnwein. At first glance it is not yet clear as to whether his works are paintings or photography. What appears at first to be photographed reality is seen to be painted upon close inspection. His pictures of children, but also of the catastrophes of history and modern times appear to us irritatingly ambiguous, as do his portraits of personalities such as Arno Breker, Andy Warhol, Che Guevara and Marilyn Manson: that which is and that which seems to be, masks and faces, image and reality merge, blur and are cast down into the depths of disfigurement.
The exhibition was created in cooperation with the Wilhelm Busch Museum, Hanover.

The exhibition puts on display works sourced from three unique collections of art: photography from Karl Blossfeldt from the collection of Ann and Jürgen Wilde located at Zülpich, decorative Romanesque capitals from the Schnütgen Museum in Cologne and antiquarian books on flora from the Bamberg State Library. The material created by artists, craftsmen and scientists over a period of almost 1,000 years is highly diverse, but all sings a song of praise dedicated to the creative forces of nature.
Karl Blossfeldt photographed the world of plants in enlargements of 2 to 40 times in order to make apparent an evolvement of art history from the forms of nature. As Walter Benjamin wrote, the power of association in relation to art history that almost forces itself upon us when we observe the photographic work is manifested in the prologue of the exhibition: the photo of the fiddlehead fern and a golden crozier, a leaf of the saxifrage and a Gothic rose window, an acanthus plant and medieval tapestry.
The exhibition allows for the first time Blossfeldt's photographic work to be seen in conjunction with Romanesque capitals from the 10th to 13th centuries. It combines over a span of 1,000 years the reverence and curiosity felt by artists and scientists in the face of the creative forces of nature.
In the old plant and herb books each plant is exactly specified in text and illustration and their use as a source of nutrition, medicine or poison is described. At the same time the pictures also attempt to respectfully display the plant as a unique creation. For these artists and scientists it was a question of knowledge and edification to an equal degree.
The unique forms of art that until now were for us the sole expression of the creative powers of man are concealed within the most unobtrusive and inconspicuous of plants. Man and nature enter into unison as creative beings in a miraculous way.

The exhibition presents 130 masterpieces of applied art from 5,000 years taken from the collections of Peter and Irene Ludwig as well as other major museums and private collections: an ancient Egyptian child's urn, a Greek bulbous amphora, an Iranian donor vessel, a pre-Columbian figurative vessel, an ancient Chinese standing amphora, a Korean calabash and a Medieval chalice. The fascination created by the exhibition's masterpieces of handicraft enable the comprehension that these vessels were once perceived as secretive, life-giving and life-destroying forces with anthropomorphic, zoomorphic and geomorphic forms imbued with the energy of nature and man. A pantheistic view of the world infuses the 'World of Vessels' that became lost in the modern age, as did the central role the vessels assumed in matriarchal culture and art.
The vessel as an object has since that time undergone an array of diverse metamorphoses. Unique porcelain and faiences from Meissen, Delft and Strasbourg show how in the gloss and glamour of the Baroque and Rococo eras the vessel as a universal symbol of creation was transformed into gallant yet delicate decoration for the table, possessing the highest levels of artistic ability.
Ceramic masterpieces from Pablo Picasso have been put on view at the end of the exhibition. After all it was thanks to Picasso that following the reform movement of Art Nouveau a significant contribution to ceramics was made, gaining new impulses after lying fallow as applied art in the 19th century.

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The exhibition, featuring 220 drawings, manuscript pages, printed cycles, watercolours and sculptures, shows the tensely exciting relationship existing between drawing and writing. Together with works from the private collection of Günter Grass and until now shown partly for the first time, the exhibition enables a highly diverse insight into his creative activity developed over the course of five decades.
Writing, drawing and sculptural activity during the creative processes of Günter Grass are on an equal footing, representing interfusing and productive forms of expression stemming from his artistic personality. Long before Günter Grass laid his parable 'The Flounder' to paper the fish was drawn with brush, charcoal and pencil; the graphic designs for the 'Diary of a Snail' on the other hand were created following the completion of the manuscript. And the first 20 pages of 'The Rat' were not written on paper but on damp clay tiles.
The activity of drawing helps Günter Grass to grasp overseen, forgotten or suppressed things that he would otherwise aim to describe with text in a sensual, physical way. A metaphor dictates that only when something is transformed into the form of a graphical sheet does it have constancy. His desire to draw objectively gives the things to which he relates to in his images and texts their overwhelming sense of clarity, serving to bring us into close proximity with life itself and enables us to smell, taste and touch its grotesque fantasy, smells, excretions, hysteria, mirth and violence. The energy of life aroused in his images flows through man, animals and plants to the same extent, coming together in an excessively Baroque, grotesque bestiary.
Cooperation partners: The Günter Grass Archive Lübeck and the Ludwig Forum for International Art, Aachen.

The exhibition shows Oberhausen in a way thoroughly unexpected from an industrial city: administration buildings and dwellings exist in a sea of trees, as in a park. Precious tree-lined alleys pervade the city like a network of green arteries. That which was created in the centre of Oberhausen from 1900 to the end of the 1930s was the realisation of a major municipal utopia for modern architecture: the centre of the city itself was transformed to a park.
At the time the municipal architect Ludwig Freitag was not only able to animate the best architects from the schools of Berlin and Darmstadt to create masterpieces of expressionist brickwork architecture, but also to allow these buildings to fuse with the city's parks and tree-lined alleys to become a unity of fascinating and rhythmical dynamism.
The recreation of the historic park city of Oberhausen with its look into the past also at the same time casts its gaze far into the future: the park city was developed with the aim of creating a 'healthy urban corpus with a network of radiating alleys and green areas as powerful arteries and lungs'.

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'Man-Made Planet' shows in 80 large-scale colour photographs and 120 black and white photographs from North America, Asia and Europe just how diversely various cultures have designed their landscapes. The photographs from Wolfgang Volz, shown for the first time, are shown as part of an exciting dialogue with the legendary artificial encroachments of Christo and Jeanne-Claude in the landscaped spaces of our planet.
Wolfgang Volz's fascinating colour photography renders visible just how mankind deals with landscape as the highly vulnerable skin of our Earth. They document that nature untouched is a fictive concept, and that all of Earth's landscapes have been formed by the doings of man. While the primeval circles of stone in Scotland and the imposing terraces and river systems of Ancient China blend organically with the land, the industrial landscapes of America and Europe shows us how mankind forcefully subjugates nature and wilfully exploits it.
'Wolfgang Volz', writes Werner Spies, 'is the eye of Christo and Jeanne-Claude'. He managed to congenially record the monumental happenings of art created for historical moments in time, thereby preserving the utopian philosophy of the works of Christo and Jeanne-Claude for the sake of eternity.

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For over ten years now Gerhard Haderer has been creating his fascinating caricatures on a weekly basis for the magazines 'Stern' and 'Profil', although Haderer does not see himself as a cartoonist but as a realist. With his almost embarrassingly precise method of observation he shows us how we really appear, or put another way what our keen striving to achieve modernity, fitness and dynamism does to our faces and bodies, our spirit and also to our environment.
And everything start off so wonderfully well: the glossy surfaces brimming with preciously painted details entice us to analysis his pictures more closely, although Haderer forbids us to make ourselves comfortable. Voyeurism quickly turns to the shudders, as what he has painted with lovingly attentive care is upon closer looks the hectic, everyday insanity of our existen¬ce: obsession with beauty and fitness, holiday stress, family get-togethers, the craving for food, TV addiction, the dependence upon mobile phones and technology, the intoxicating thrill of speed, the lasciviousness of scandal, the craving for destruction, megalomania and egomania. Haderer's drawings show us not as lamentable victims but as fanatical participants that invest their complete ¬energy of life in this daily madness. The images show that the vision of Neil Postman, 'we amuse ourselves to death' is no longer a prophesy but indeed grim reality.
The exhibition shows 140 original drawings and cartoons, including the image series 'The Life of Jesus' that in recent years caused a scandal in Austria by flouting with religious sensitivities.
Cooperation partner: Wilhelm Busch Museum, Hanover

In 1951 Otto Steinert released a form of expression with the exhibitions of 'subjective photography' in Saarbrücken that at the time heartened young photographers from all over Europe the find expression for their subjective sentiments, thoughts and fears in the form of bold pictorial experiments.
The show begins with the works of the legendary 'subjective photography' exhibition. Images from Moholy-Nagy, Man Ray, Hausmann and Bayer are shown together with works from Otto Steinert and his students. The latter documents that the photographic department at the State School for Art and Handicrafts in Saarbrücken was at that time a productive entity for the development of subjective photography born from the independent language of the medium, a creative laboratory in which Otto Steinert together with his students created a new photographic style. In 'Camera' magazine Otto Toussaint wrote in 1959: 'These images used to be other images. Evolving from the New Objectivity movement, but overcoming its boldness of representation and impersonal, technical pictorial language, photographers from all over the world had found a new style. Not the rendering of objects, but individual recordings of the existence of things, created through subjective sensitivity as an element of design. Human existences had been made visible by the 'objective' photos shot in accordance with traditional ways of teaching. The process of photography had been revealed to be a spiritually creative process. An art of imagery had been born to match the prevailing situation of mankind.'
An exhibition in cooperation with the Ann and Jürgen Wilde Collection, Zülpich, and supported by the Saarland Museum Foundation and Saarland Cultural Heritage.

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Nadja Auermann, Milla Jovovich, Naomi Campbell, Linda Evangelista, Tatjana Patitz, Kristen McMenamy, Amber Valletta and Marie-Sophie Wilson are just some of the supermodels and stars that the photography of Peter Lindbergh has transformed into icons of the modern era. Yearningly adored and grimly cursed in the past as goddesses, amazons, witches and fairies, and now reborn through Peter Lindbergh's photographic power of imagery in the form of supermodels. The enigmatic, sphinx-like quality of his women is at the same time their inner contradiction: strong women, but women that are also vulnerable, brittle, fragile. Wim Wenders in the latest Lindbergh book 'Stories' relates that the exhibition title denotes the women as being strong but without protection, full of devotion to the cause but untouchable, both familiar and distanced at the same time. With the expressionist methods of fashion photography Peter Lindbergh sets his Stories in scene at the most unusual of the world's locations. He casts his models against the towering industrial facades of Duisburg steelworks, the rugged cliffs at Zabriskie Point, within the urban canyons of Manhattan and on the deserted beaches of California. These are singular landscapes that with the artificiality of the creative entities coming to life from within them become the venues for modern myths, appearing at the same time real and a part of fiction. The 'Invasion' story forms the central part of the exhibition, a fantastically modern apocalypse documenting the arrival of beings from outer space to the planet Earth.

STORIES is the most comprehensive show of Peter Lindbergh's work until the present time. The 204 mostly large-format photographs are shown in this exhibition for the first time together with expressive documentary films such as the film about Pina Bausch, and his commercial advertising spots.

The exhibition shows for the first time masterpieces of both ancient and contemporary Chinese art. It delineates the cultural area of conflict in which Chinese culture is set today: in the grips of an awe-inspiring and ancient art evolved from the forces of tradition and a cultural upheaval driven on by the hustle and bustle of economical progress, putting to question the complete array of the traditional concepts of value and beauty.
Unique works such as the nine-part chimes from the Zhou period (8th century B.C.) and the group of ceramic camels from the Tang Dynasty (8th century A.D.) show that ancient Chinese art was characterised by both the highest spiritual withdrawal as well as exciting elements of expression. The coming together of these works of art in an exhibition drawn from various millennia may well contribute to Europeans better comprehending the daunting contradictions between tradition and modernity existing in China today.
The exhibition was created in cooperation with the Museum for East Asian Art Cologne, the Museum Ludwig Cologne, the Ludwig Forum for International Art Aachen and the China National Museum of Fine Arts Peking.

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No artistic movement has so fascinatingly expressed the American spirit of the times as much as Pop Art. Since the seventies American artists of various generations such as Warhol, Lichtenstein, Haring, Longo, Scharf and Beckley have uplifted the triviality of the American Way to become the heroes of their images, integrating the graphic language of popular magazines, advertising, photography and graffiti into their methods of expression.
The works of Keith Haring, Robert Longo, Kenny Scharf and Bill Beckley also show us the American culture of fun, in which all is happy, funny or pretty, but is still part of a society that 'amuses itself to death', as once prophesied by Neil Postman. Whether it is the expressive language of graffiti contained within the paintings of Haring and Scharf or the analytical photography of Longo and Beckley, we experience their uplifting and at the same time shuddering fascination: the goings-on of the fun generation conceal hysteria, alienation, violence and the fear of death. This ambivalence between the desire for pleasure and the fear of death has existed in the works of Pop Art since the time of Andy Warhol. Much of that communicated by the images of Keith Haring, Robert Longo, Kenny Scharf and Bill Beckley since the 80's and 90's indeed first becomes cognisant following the 11th of September.
The exhibition is organised in cooperation with the Kunstverein Oberhausen and Galerie Mayer, Dusseldorf.

We come across images of gods both old and new and from different cultures in the masterpieces of painting, sculpture, applied art, poster art and photography: the Egyptian queen Nefertiti, Olympic athletes, the 'enlightened' Buddha, the Holy Virgin, Aphrodite, the Indian goddess Sita, the Medieval knights and the awe-inspiring Fudó, the highly gifted actress Sarah Bernardt, the godly Garbo, the rock idol Elvis Presley and the superstar Michael Jackson.
All gods, heroes, idols, holy people, witches and demons are the immortal paragons that are resurrected in the pantheon of our modern Trivial culture. The everyday imagery of films, photography, comics and television and the power of their systematic distribution via electronic pictorial communication is responsible for their continued fascination in the everyday lives of people: the arousing of passions, keeping demons at safe distance, fulfilling holy expectations, maintaining balances, separating good from evil in a world where Heaven is devoid of gods and where we must get used to seeing activity and experiences in cyber-space as being more real than those of our senseless everyday lives.
The exhibition was created in cooperation with the Basel Museum of Antiquities, the Ludwig Collection, the Ludwig Forum for International Art Aachen, the Museum Ludwig Cologne, the Rautenstrauch Joest Museum Cologne, the Suermondt Ludwig Museum Aachen and others.