Exhibitions

In 2004, the Museum Folkwang hosted Saâdane Afif's first exhibition in Germany. At that time, no one could have known that over the next two decades, the young artist would develop a multifaceted, interdisciplinary body of work, the foundation for which had been laid with the texts for Melancholic Beat. These led him to use performance art and, subsequently, to design posters. Saâdane Afif is showing 80 of these screen prints …

The New Zealand artist Kate Newby (b. 1979) developed a site-specific installation for Museum Folkwang. She selected the transitional area between the museum’s original building, opened in 1960, and the extension completed in 2010. Despite their different periods of construction, both buildings share the formal language of modernist architecture, characterised by clean lines, rectangular courtyards, and expansive glass façades …

Gustave Courbet’s radical visual language, his sociopolitical aspirations and his influence on modern art remain as powerful today as ever. He rejected the idealised aesthetics of classicism and romanticism, making the lives of ordinary people and reality the subject of his paintings instead. With his uncompromising attitude and innovative painting technique, Courbet is considered a pioneer of modernism – a boundary breaker …

Kiriakos Tompolidis has set up shop in Museum Folkwang. In The Quiet Hour one steps into a kind of room long lived in; there, the artist, a native of Essen (born in 1997) toys with fragments from his memory. He has produced seven paintings specially for the exhibition, and in terms of content art history references and personal memories overlap, while formally speaking photographical elements meld with painting. Sleep without …