COLOGNE.- ”2026 is set to be a very special year for Museum Ludwig. We will be celebrating our 50th anniversary with an extensive program of exhibitions, workshops, and other activities. Our credibility rests on the fact that our actions are not guided by short-term policies, instead our program is based on responsibility. Where once the museum was mainly an educational institution, today we have become more of a meeting place for people to share their ideas and thoughts; a place where people come to recognize that there is not just one truth but rather different perspectives.” —Director Yilmaz Dziewior

Exhibitions

HERE AND NOW at Museum Ludwig: De/Collecting Memories from Turtle Island
February 7–November 8, 2026

Curators: Miriam Szwast and Santi Grunewald

Memories are fragile things. We collect them, pass them on, overlay or efface them. Focusing on the processes of memory, the new project in the exhibition series HERE AND NOW questions Western pictorial constructions so to render repressed Indigenous narratives visible.

The centerpiece of the exhibition is the installation Thirteen Moons by contemporary artist and member of the Seneca Nation, Marie Watt (b. 1967 in Seattle). Her work of thirteen hanging sculptures made of tin creates a cloud of sound when touched. It is a tribute to the Jingle Dress Dance, a healing ritual of the Ojibwe tribe initiated during the influenza pandemic in 1918–20 and passed down from one generation to the next despite being banned by the state—a radical act of resistance.

Watt’s work appears alongside historical photochromes from the museum’s collection, published by the Detroit Photographic Company around 1900. These mass-produced postcard images depict modern cities and deserted landscapes of the United States: representations of a land in which Indigenous peoples are deliberately omitted, although this supposedly unspoiled natural environment to be claimed is their home. The juxtaposition with Watt’s sculptures shows how history is constructed and what is left out.

Yayoi Kusama
March 14–August 2, 2026

Curator: Stephan Diederich

Yayoi Kusama is world famous for her walk-in mirrored rooms, and her polka dots have become something of a trademark. In its 50th anniversary year, Museum Ludwig is staging a retrospective exhibition of the Japanese artist, offering insights into her more than seventy-year art practice. The major donation gifted to the museum by Peter and Irene Ludwig when it first opened in 1976 included a work by Kusama. In addition to this work, other iconic pieces will be presented alongside works never seen before in Europe. One highlight will be a new Infinity Mirror Room that the artist is installing for Museum Ludwig. Kusama was part of the American network of artists associated with Andy Warhol, but she returned to Japan early on and developed her own unmistakable form of art. She does not shy away from addressing big issues: pain and death, emotions and illness, war and love. The artist’s biography, experiences, and feelings all feed into her art, making the work mirror her own existence and convey personal messages. Of fundamental importance to her is the philosophy that everything is in a never-ending process of renewal—a process that visitors can experience through her unique and visionary artistic world.

Yayoi Kusama is organized by Museum Ludwig in collaboration with Fondation Beyeler (October 12, 2025–January 25, 2026) and Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (September 12, 2026–January 17, 2027).

Along the Color Line: Perspectives of a Transatlantic Modernity
October 3, 2026–March 7, 2027

Curator: Eboa Itondo

Modernism describes a radical departure from the past and in art a completely new visual idiom. It spread to all spheres of culture and life at a time of significant change and social upheaval in the early twentieth century. Yet, even today, modern art history is still based on the work of white, Western European and North American artists. But how did artists from the black diaspora perceive, evolve, or consciously distance themselves from modernism?

This exhibition shows how modern art has developed in different communities and across places. Based on such movements as the Harlem Renaissance in the United States and Négritude in Europe, Along the Color Line traces the artistic relations between the transatlantic continents and explores their impact on art production today. Assembling works from the Museum Ludwig collection—in which non-European, non-white art is still underrepresented—with new acquisitions and loans, the exhibition presents visual artworks alongside the literature and music of the Black diaspora.

The show aims to reaffirm the founding mission of Museum Ludwig in our anniversary year of 2026—to highlight voices that have for too long gone unheard.

Presentations in the photography rooms
Two Germanies circa 1980
April 18–October 11, 2026

Curator: Barbara Engelbach

Photographs from East and West Germany around 1980 document the lifeworlds in both german states, each marked by different political and economic systems. Portraits and everyday scenes by Derek Bennett, Christiane Eisler, Karl C. Kugel, Ute Mahler, Henry Maitek, Evelyn Richter, and Erasmus Schröter afford a glimpse into these realities.

Man Ray: Kiki
October 31, 2026–April 4, 2027

Curator: Miriam Szwast

Man Ray’s photograph of Alice Prin, popularly known as Kiki de Montparnasse (1901–1953), depicts her with her back turned and nude to below the waist, a cloth draped around her hips, another around her head. Inspired by Jean- Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s nudes from behind, Man Ray transposes the subject into the twentieth century. Its exhibition explores the making and history of this iconic photo of Man Ray surrealism.

Schultze Projects
Schultze Projects #5–Jana Euler
July 18, 2026–July 2028

Curator: Yilmaz Dziewior. Every two to three years, artists are invited to present a new monumental work for the wall of the museum’s main staircase. In 2026, Jana Euler will be creating a new large-scale painting. With humor, her paintings deconstruct power structures and gender stereotypes. The Schultze Projects series honors Informel painter Bernard Schultze and his partner, Ursula Schultze-Bluhm.

2026 Wolfgang Hahn Prize: Lee Ufan
November 7, 2026–April 4, 2027

South Korean artist Lee Ufan (born 1936, lives in Kamakura, Japan) has been awarded the 32nd Wolfgang Hahn Prize by the Gesellschaft für Moderne Kunst am Museum Ludwig. His art brings together contrasting forces such as emptiness and tension, silence and energy. As co-founder of the Japanese minimalist Mono-ha movement (“School of Things”), a collective of artists in Tokyo between 1968 and 1975, he continues to seek a harmonious reordering of things.