Dont miss out

Parallel to ART COLOGNE, important exhibitions in the Rhineland are once again inviting visitors to museums this fall. Perhaps the most groundbreaking of these can be seen at K20 in Düsseldorf from September 27, 2025. There, the group exhibition “Queer Modernism. 1900 to 1950” shows that art history has never been straightforward. The show aims to present the by no means insignificant contribution of queer artists to the avant-garde. Some of those who created the most daring art in the first half of the 20th century assumed a sexual identity that was considered equally “challenging” at the time and later disappeared from official historiography, from Claude Cahun to Toyen to John Cage.

The prologue introduces French painter Rosa Bonheur, who was known for her depictions of animals in the 19th century. She wore men's clothing and lived in a partnership with inventor Nathalie Micas for 40 years. The chapter “Modern Arcadia” shows how Dame Ethel Walker, Lotte Laserstein, and Ludwig von Hofmann used fantastical or intimate images to express homoerotic desire. “Sapphic Modernism” focuses on salons and networks run by lesbian women in Paris, where Gertrude Stein, for example, was active. “Surreal Worlds” brings together positions of Surrealism that dealt with concepts of androgyny and hermaphroditism.

“Queer Avant-Gardes and Intimate Networks” presents male homosexuality and artists such as Pavel Tchelitchew, George Platt Lynes, Beauford Delaney, and Nils Dardel, who encountered the avant-garde movements in New York and Paris. “Queer Resistance since 1933” is dedicated to the anti-fascist activities of Jeanne Mammen and Hannah Höch. Finally, the epilogue shows that even in the conservative 1950s, Sonja Sekula and John Cage were confronted with the homophobic cultural policies of the McCarthy era.

A few steps further on in the Kunstpalast, alongside the exhibition of 80 works by Hans-Peter Feldmann, from September 25, 2025, visitors will be able to study other long-marginalized positions of women in the exhibition “Künstlerinnen! Von Monjé bis Münter” (Women Artists! From Monjé to Münter). Female artists who were very much present in the 19th century, such as Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann, Marie Wiegmann, and Paula Monjé, are comparatively underrepresented in public collections such as that of the Kunstpalast, and many of the works gathered in the exhibition are being shown again for the first time.

The artists featured in the exhibition “Five Friends: John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly,” which will run at the Ludwig Museum in Cologne starting October 3, 2025, did not suffer from a lack of attention. They met at the famous Black Mountain College in North Carolina. Cage and Cunningham taught there, while Rauschenberg and Twombly joined as students. Shortly thereafter, Jasper Johns became part of the group. The exhibition highlights the close artistic, friendly, and homoerotic relationship between these five influential postwar artists through their mutual influences. Cage and Cunningham were life partners since the 1940s. Rauschenberg and Twombly met and fell in love in 1951. Twombly left Rauschenberg because of his affair with Jasper Johns and moved to Italy. Rauschenberg was the set designer for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, whose objects and costumes characterize the exhibition and illustrate the interdisciplinarity, experimental spirit, and inventiveness of the friends.

The icing on the cake in Neuss will be the exhibition ‘Incarnate’, which opens on 9 November 2025. It is the first collaboration between the Julia Stoschek Foundation and the Langen Foundation. Time-based media art from the Julia Stoschek Collection will be presented in dialogue with classic Japanese and Asian works from the Viktor and Marianne Langen Collection in the Tadao Ando building. In philosophy and theology, the term ‘incarnation’ refers to the manifestation of the invisible. With works spanning more than a thousand years, from the 7th century to the present, ‘Incarnate’ explores the relationship between body and consciousness, mind and machine, image and reality.

Author: Alexandra Wach