Collection in Motion.

15 Rooms, 15 Stories!

Sun, May 21, 2023–Wed, Dec 24, 2025

Kaiser Wilhelm Museum

With the first exhibition of Impressionist painting in Paris in April 1874, 150 years ago, a new art movement was born. At the same time, photography, as a technical innovation, created fascination and expanded the spectrum of artistic forms of expression. Since then, painting and photography have to a certain extent been powerful competitors in the visual arts. At the same time, the two media shape and influence each other. Just like technology, the environment and the reality of people's lives changed rapidly as the 19th century progressed. Everyday scenes became the focus of painting, with the aim of capturing personal impressions, changing light conditions and visual moods depending on the time of day or season. This new perception of reality ultimately gave rise to Impressionism exactly 150 years ago. The French painter and co-founder of Impressionism, Claude Monet, painted London's Parliament on the Thames at sunset in 1904. He overcame the naturalistic use of color and neglected architectural details. Just like Claude Monet because of his unconventional painting style, the first artist photographers around 1900 were also controversial. The new room at the KWM tells the story of the works of some of the protagonists from this period.

Convolutes of the collection of objects of non-European origin is being presented for the first time. These are primarily arts and crafts from Africa, Oceania and South East and East Asia, which came to the Kaiser Wilhelm Museum between 1891 and 1930 and were intended to serve as inspiration for local artistic and industrial production. The provenance and cultural contexts of the objects were investigated in an extensive project funded by the Deutsches Zentrum Kulturgutverluste. The presentation introduces the objects and tells the story of their provenance.

The Kunstmuseen Krefeld are expanding their collection with a donation from the Düsseldorf jewelry designer and visual artist Linda Müller. Her works enter into an extraordinary dialog with historical Art Nouveau objects from the museum's founding period around 1900. The KWM's historical collection includes works by the Danish silversmith Georg Jensen, who opened his own workshop in Copenhagen in 1904 and quickly became one of the leading Art Nouveau jewelry designers. His floral and ornamental designs bear witness to the precision of his craftsmanship, his artistic flair and the close connection between art and nature. This chapter is supplemented by so-called katagami - Japanese coloring stencils from the 19th century. Their filigree workmanship and aesthetic effect inspired numerous European artists and had a lasting influence on the formal language of Art Nouveau.

The internationally renowned artist Gregor Schneider has realized a new, site-specific project for Haus Esters for his exhibition Welcome. In his work entitled Haus Alhmam Aldaas, he thematizes the Bauhaus villa designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe as a private residence, public museum and symbol of modernism - and thus also refers to issues of flight and migration. The artist has invited a family from Syria to live in the museum. Schneider accompanied the project both photographically and on film. The photographs and the film can be seen from May 23 to September 21, 2025 in the Kaiser Wilhelm Museum on the second floor as part of the Collection in Motion series.

Following on from Impressionism, Expressionism emerged at the beginning of the 20th century as another important movement in art. Under the title A Perceived World, a room at the KWM is dedicated to this progressive style of painting, which is primarily concerned with the expression of the inner emotional world. While the painters of the Brücke formed in Dresden and the Blaue Reiter in Munich, a Rhenish variant emerged in 1913 on the occasion of an exhibition in Bonn. Among the participating artists were the painters Heinrich Campendonk, Helmuth Macke and Heinrich Nauen, who are now on display in a room at the KWM. All three come from Krefeld, are closely associated with the history of the KWM and are among the most important representatives of Rhenish Expressionism. The new room in Collection in Motion tells their story and shows how painting detached itself from the canvas and was transferred to furniture, textiles, glass windows and walls.

Another new room on the first floor of the KWM is dedicated to the creative ideas and innovative formal language of modernism in the 1920s. Paintings and prints by pioneering figures such as Piet Mondrian (1872 - 1944), Anni Albers (1899 - 1994) and László Moholy-Nagy (1895 - 1946) are arranged with tubular steel furniture by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886 - 1969) and Marcel Breuer (1902 - 1981), which recently entered the collection of the Kunstmuseen Krefeld as new acquisitions. The formal interplay of everyday objects and paintings shows how fluid the boundaries between image, spatial and object design were at the time. The artists and designers were concerned with a systematic organization of means, a generally understandable expression and a reduction to elementary design elements. Teaching at the State Bauhaus, where Marcel Breuer and Anni Albers, among others, studied and which Ludwig Mies van der Rohe later directed, was also based on these ideas.

In 2020, the Kunstmuseen Krefeld launched a new concept for the presentation of its collection that introduces the extensive holdings in a dynamic, varied way and with diverse themes. Under the title Collection in Motion, 15 stories line up like a string of pearls in the 15 rooms on the second floor of the Kaiser Wilhelm Museum. Again and again, a new room emerges, and sculptures, paintings, photography and design objects come together to form other surprising stories. Other rooms are thematically dedicated to, among others, Herbert Zangs, Street Photography and Pop Art.