ART COLOGNE

Plan ahead. Here's where to start this weekend in the Rhineland.

The art season opens with a celebration and it only gets richer from there. All within reach, all running in sync with ART COLOGNE, all worth the journey.

📌 Museum Ludwig Köln: 50th anniversary, 13 September — free entry, public festival, performances and workshops. And on 3 October, Along the Colour Line — Traces of a Transatlantic Modernity opens, placing the art of the international Black diaspora in critical dialogue with European modernism. Through 7 March 2027.

📌K20 K21 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen: Franz Marc. The Search for a Better World. The first comprehensive solo exhibition of this pioneering Expressionist in a German museum in over 20 years. 120 masterpieces, from vibrant animal paintings to Cubist abstraction. 12 September – 24 January 2027.

📌 Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf: Two shows worth the detour. Niki de Saint Phalle. Dream Machine — celebrating the rebellious, emancipatory spirit of the French-American artist far beyond her famous Nanas. From 10 September through 7 February 2027. And Immendorff — the first comprehensive retrospective of the prince of painters. Politically charged, contradictory, unforgettable. From 25 September through 10 January 2027.

📌 Kunstmuseum Bonn: Aki Inomata, Mit-Werden. The Japanese artist's acclaimed German debut — biology, high technology and visual art in direct conversation. Through 1 November 2026.

📌 Arp Museum Bahnhof Rolandseck: To the Stars! Space and Escape from the World since Modernism. Max Ernst, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Yael Bartana, Katharina Sieverding — the cosmos as canvas for human longing, fear and utopia. Spectacularly situated above the Rhine. Through 10 January 2027.

📌 Von Der Heydt-Museum Wuppertal: Beautiful & Austere: The Power of Ornament. Ornament as structure, as power, as principle — not decoration. From 11 October through 14 February 2027.

🔗 Dive deeper and read the full ART COLOGNE Journal >> artcologne.com

ART COLOGNE: 5–8 November 2026 | Koelnmesse

Images:
James Gregory Atkinson, 6 Friedberg-Chicago, 2021, film still; 4K video with sound, 6’18min; Commissioned by the Dortmunder Kunstverein and with the kind support of the Hessian Cultural Foundation, Villa Aurora LA, and the Goethe-Institut New York, © James Gregory

Franz Marc, Die kleinen gelben Pferde, 1911, Öl auf Leinwand, 66 × 104 cm‚ Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, erworben 1957. Photo: © Staatsgalerie Stuttgart.

Per Olof Ultvedt, Robert Rauschenberg, Martial Raysse, Daniel Spoerri, Jean Tinguely, Niki de Saint Phalle, 1962, Foto (c) Christer Strömholm.

AKI INOMATA, Why not hand over a 'shelter' to hermit crabs?, White Chapel, 2014-2015, Courtesy of Maho Kubota Gallery, © AKI INOMATA

Yael Bartana, Farewell (Filmstill), 2024. © Courtesy of the artist and Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam; Sommer Contemporary Art Tel Aviv; Galleria Raffaella Cortese, Milan; Petzel Gallery, New York; Capitain Petzel, Berlin; Cecilia Hillstrom Gallery, Stockholm and Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich.

Susan Hefuna, Woman behind Mashrabiya, 1997. © Courtesy of Susan Hefuna.

+++ The ADKV-ART COLOGNE Prize for Art Criticism 2026 goes to Sarah Alberti, Leipzig +++

Alberti was born in 1989 in Leipzig — eight months before the fall of the Berlin Wall. She has spent fifteen years writing from that city, about that history, without ever treating Eastern Germany as a special case requiring catching-up. For her it is a touchstone: for the narratives the pan-German art system has constructed about itself, for the biographies and works that find or fail to find their place in the canon, for the gaps that only become visible when someone with her knowledge and persistence decides to name them.

The jury honours a practice rather than individual texts. Her writing — in the daily and weekly press, in art magazines, in interview series and exhibition projects — combines precise historical knowledge with judgment that goes beyond description. The knowledgeability speaks from the subtext without pushing itself to the fore.
Her submitted texts include a contention with the Unity and Freedom Monument in Leipzig and a review of the German Pavilion at this year's Venice Biennale. They are texts, the jury notes, that presumably only exist because this author does.

Art criticism in Germany concentrates heavily around the capital and the major events. Alberti has been breaking out of that dynamic for years, with insistence and with a recognisable posture. The prize acknowledges her tenacity — and names what is necessary in the present landscape of art journalism: voices that repeatedly reveal decisive gaps of representation.

Congratulations, Sarah Alberti.

The prize is endowed with 5,000 Euro and awarded annually by the ADKV Arbeitsgemeinschaft Deutscher Kunstvereine in cooperation with ART COLOGNE since 2006.

ART COLOGNE: 5-8 November 2026 | Koelnmesse

ART COLOGNE 2026 — the full exhibitor list is out.

From Budapest to Havana, from Tartu to São Paulo — 164 galleries from 22 countries gather in Cologne, 5–8 November, for the 59th edition of the world's first art fair.

+++ 164 galleries +++ 22 countries +++ 47 newcomers or long-awaited returns +++ 59th edition +++

Expect a strong mix across all four sections +++ GALLERIES with Buchholz, Continua, Gisela Capitain, Karsten Greve, Max Hetzler, Mennour, Nagel Draxler, Sprüth Magers, Thaddaeus Ropac and many more +++ NEUMARKT with 35 young international galleries including debuts from Copenhagen, Oslo, Amsterdam, Zurich, New York and Tartu +++ COLLABORATIONS with jointly curated projects from galleries across Europe and beyond +++ ART + OBJECT bringing functional art, design and applied arts into dialogue with the visual arts.

Three special solo presentations complement the programme: Eva Lootz, Christian Megert and Hermann Nitsch — curated by exhibiting galleries, adding depth to the fair's ongoing conversation with the 20th century.

LBBW presents What moves us — art as a mirror of the times +++ ZADIK focuses on the art market between West and East Germany, 1949–1990 +++ TEXTE ZUR KUNST organises the talks programme.

"Together, these contributions broaden the perspective of the fair, linking artistic practice, collecting and art-market history with the questions shaping the present." — Daniel Hug, Art Director of ART COLOGNE.

The world's first art fair. See you in Cologne.

📌 The full list of exhibitors is now live –> artcologne.com

5–8 November 2026 |Koelnmesse, Cologne.

>>> The ticketshop is now open: www.artcologne.com

DC Open closes at 17:00 today - discover the new exhibitions now -

Ryo Kinosh*ta: Under Cygnus and Aries. Galerie Khoshbakht, Jülicher Strasse 24a, Cologne. Thru 24 Oct.

One concept runs through everything Kinosh*ta makes: Ma. The Japanese principle of the interval — the space between things that connects rather than separates. The pause that gives music its meaning. The gap between two people that makes their relationship possible.

Kinosh*ta came to understand Ma through years working with textiles. He lays oil paint down in threads across a grid, interweaving them the way a loom does — then overlays further threads with slight variations. Bodies, animals, geometric figures appear, disappear and reconfigure themselves as you move closer or further away. Like a Zen garden whose lines drawn in gravel invite the eye to slow down. Like the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland, which appears and disappears until only its smile remains.

In Retired Kneecap (2026), a leg pierced by two arrows wearing a striped sock emerges from the vertical stripes of the painting's background. Yellow-orange for the background, white for the leg — only colour separates them. In a logic of permutation, the leg could just as easily become the background. And vice versa. The space between, that is where Kinosh*ta works.

See it in Cologne.

ART COLOGNE: 5–8 November 2026 | Koelnmesse.

DC Open, Cologne - First stop: DREI.

Mother of Pearl brings together four international artists across three generations — Heidi Bucher, Helena Huneke, Willa Wasserman and Mira M. Yang — whose practices meet in a shared territory: personal memory, collective experience and the traces both leave behind.

At the centre hangs Heidi Bucher's Untitled (Puerta del Palacio Ico), 1986 — a key late work made on Lanzarote, where she spent the final decade of her life. The island's austere architecture, its volcanic stone, its teal-coloured patinas absorbed into her practice of skinning. The door on view still bears the remnants of that patina. It carries both the cultural history of its site and the personal history of its maker.
Helena Huneke's phantasmatic tableaux on linen accumulate clothes, a badminton racket, painting supplies — sewn and glued onto the cloth, supporting drawings, embroideries, writings, pastel-like reliefs. "Künstler sind keine Spekulationsobjekte," she declared. Their work survives in the mist. Misreadings and gaps are part of the process.

Willa Wasserman's lush brushstrokes rely as much on negative space as on colour — wild violets, chalky whites, slate blues intermingling as figures drift in and out of focus. Willa Wasserman's Apuna (Arina) is an earnest attempt to capture the fading memory of someone beloved, but long-absent.

Mira M. Yang's mirror work 바리데기-D draws on the Korean performing tradition of pansori — a space where identity and memory are unstable, incomplete and necessary at once.

DREI, Cologne. Thru 24 Oct.

See you in Cologne.

ART COLOGNE: 5–8 November 2026 | Koelnmesse.

Perfect way to start your DC Open 2026

Shannon Bool: Magnificent Transmutations at Kunst-Station Sankt Peter Köln. Thru 25 Oct.

Step inside this magnificent church and experience how Bool has filled the spacious nave and the baptistery of St Peter’s with a dialogue that spans centuries, materials and cities. The centrepiece is *Grandiose Magnificent Borderline*, a large jacquard tapestry on which – look closely! – elegantly dressed figures in the style of the Parisian fashion house Lanvin are interwoven with the towering architecture of the JP Morgan Chase Tower in Manhattan. Fashion history, futuristic architecture and social significance — literally interwoven, thread by thread.

Next to it, a bespoke lantern that references the street lighting of Berlin’s Karl-Marx-Allee, whose glass casing shimmers in the vibrant colours of the Gothic windows of St Peter’s. Do also walk downstairs and discover, by the baptismal font, the small-scale ceramic works that draw on Bool’s personal visual archive of architectural patterns, from the Middle Ages to the present day.

Shannon Bool is represented by Galerie Kadel Willborn - an Art Cologne exhibitor.

ART COLOGNE: 5-8 November 2026 | Koelnmesse

From Cologne to Düsseldorf.

This weekend, up the Rhine — and here, the programme is serious too. Richter, Polke, Palermo, Knoebel and Adnan together at Schönewald. Hermann de Vries at the Zero Foundation, 95 years old and still the gate. Vivien Greven in dialogue with Lambert Maria Wintersberger at Kadel Willborn. Sammlung Philara celebrating a decade with House of Balagan.

Among the Düsseldorf highlights:
> Kadel Willborn: Vivien Greven in Dialogue with Lambert Maria Wintersberger — Fruit of the Loom. Thru 31 Oct.
> Anna Laudel: Lennart Brede — Allez Gut. Thru 22 Oct.
> Linn Lühn: Irmel Kamp. Thru 31 Oct.
> Galerie Ludorff: FormenSprache — Bernd & Hilla Becher × Brigitte & Martin Matschinsky-Denninghoff. Thru 10 Oct.
> Rupert Pfab: Aneta Kajzer & Ilse Henin — Face to Face. Thru 24 Oct.
> SCHÖNEWALD: Abstraktion, Licht & Farbe — Adnan, Calderara, Graubner, Knoebel, Palermo, Polke, Richter, Sandback, Schumacher and more. Thru 2 Oct.
> Petra Rinck Galerie: Bendzulla × Breunig — Bilder. Thru 24 Oct.
> Ruttkowski68: Fabian Treiber & Michael Günzer — Im Gerinne. Thru 23 Oct.
> VAN HORN: Pip Culbert & Gerhard Hoehme — Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed. Thru 17 Oct.

And beyond the galleries:
> ZERO foundation - Düsseldorf: Hermann de Vries — Zero is the Gate, on the occasion of his 95th birthday. Thru 25 Oct.
> Sammlung Philara: House of Balagan — 10 Jahre Sammlung Philara. Thru 14 Feb 2027.

DC OPEN 2026 opening hours:
Fri 4 Sept, 18:00–21:00
Sat 5 Sept, 13:00–19:00
Sun 6 Sept, 13:00–17:00

See you along the Rhine.

ART COLOGNE: 5–8 November 2026 | Koelnmesse

A Tribute to Carolin Scharpff-Striebich.

Carolin Scharpff-Striebich was one of the most dedicated and warmly regarded figures in the German contemporary art world. A collector with genuine conviction, an institutional presence of rare commitment, and a person who made time for artists, institutions and colleagues with equal generosity.

In 2004, Carolin took over the Sammlung Scharpff from her parents Rudolf and Ute Scharpff and made it her own — expanding it, internationalising it, and opening it to public museums across Germany so that the collection could be experienced beyond private walls. Around the same time she began building her own collection, with a younger generation of international artists and a sharp critical sensibility entirely her own.

Beyond collecting, she gave herself fully to the institutions she believed in. She served on the acquisitions board at Tate Modern, as Chair of the Board of Trustees of the Peter und Irene Ludwig Stiftung, as Chair of the Friends of Kunstmuseum Bonn, and as trustee at the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart and the KUNSTHALLE TÜBINGEN. In each of these roles she brought the same quality: genuine care for what contemporary art can do in the world, and the courage to act on it.

Carolin Scharpff-Striebich passed away on 28 August in Bonn, aged 63. Far too soon.

Our deepest condolences to her family, her colleagues and all those who had the privilege of knowing and working alongside her.

This is how the Rhineland opens its cultural season.

50 galleries open their doors simultaneously across Cologne and Düsseldorf, 4–6 September — welcome to the 18th edition of DC Open. Louise Bourgeois at Karsten Greve. Nadya Tolokonnikova at Nagel Draxler. Gisela Capitain celebrating 40 years. New kid on the Cologne block: Dittrich & Schlechtriem. And much more across the city. Dive in — the season arrives.

Among the highlights in Cologne:

> Clages Gallery: Isabella Séville Fürnkäs. Thru 17 Oct.
> DITTRICH & SCHLECHTRIEM: Zuzanna Czebatul — In this Economy!? Thru 24 Oct.
> DREI: Mother of Pearl — Heidi Bucher, Helena Huneke, Willa Wasserman, Mira M. Yang. Thru 24 Oct.
> fiebach, minninger: Nicolas Pelzer — Stubborn Promises. Thru 17 Oct.
> Galerie Karsten Greve: Louise Bourgeois. Thru 7 Nov.
> Galerie Gisela Capitain: 40th anniversary — a group exhibition drawn from the gallery's entire history. Thru 24 Oct.
> Jan Kaps: Mohit Shelare. Thru 24 Oct.
> Galerie Khoshbakht: Ryo Kinosh*ta. Thru 24 Oct.
> Galerie Martin Kudlek: Helena Parada Kim — Entangled. Thru 24 Oct.
> M29-Richter: Doris Frohnapfel und Heide Nord — Movements in Remaining Areas. Thru 17 Oct.
> Galerie Nagel Draxler: Nadya Tolokonnikova — Memory Loss. Thru 22 Oct.
> Berthold Pott: Eva Robarts — A Trip to the Coast. Thru 14 Oct.
> Rehbein Galerie: Stephan Melzl — Guter Hoffnung. Thru 24 Oct.
> Galerie Bene Taschen: Jamel Shabazz. Thru 14 Nov.
> Galerie Boiserée: Bernar Venet. Thru 17 Oct.

DC OPEN 2026 opening hours:
Fri 4 Sept, 18:00–21:00
Sat 5 Sept, 13:00–19:00
Sun 6 Sept, 13:00–17:00

See you in Cologne.

ART COLOGNE: 5–8 November 2026 | Koelnmesse