WUPPERTAL.- The Von der Heydt Museum in Wuppertal has unveiled its 2026 programme, and it is one that looks both sharply at the past and directly at the present. With two major exhibitions scheduled across the year, the museum is setting out to revisit overlooked artistic positions while also addressing questions that feel increasingly urgent in today’s visually saturated world.

The year opens with Carl Grossberg. matter-of-fact – magical – visionary, on view from 22 March to 30 August 2026, a long-overdue retrospective of one of the most compelling figures of New Objectivity. Grossberg, born in what is now Wuppertal and active primarily in the interwar period, produced a remarkably focused body of work over just two decades before his death in 1940. His paintings—marked by precision, restraint, and an almost photographic clarity—engage deeply with architecture, industry, and the promises and anxieties of technological progress.

This exhibition, the first comprehensive retrospective of Grossberg’s work in more than 30 years, brings together key paintings alongside rarely seen and newly identified works. Particularly striking are his enigmatic “dream images” from the 1920s and 1930s, which introduce an unexpected sense of unease and ambiguity into his otherwise sober visual language. Seen today, Grossberg’s work resonates strongly with contemporary debates around industrial transformation, automation, and the human cost of progress. His cool surfaces and exacting compositions seem to ask questions that remain unresolved a century later.

The exhibition also places Grossberg in dialogue with photography, a medium that profoundly shaped his way of seeing. His work anticipated and influenced later photographic practices, a connection made visible through carefully selected references to figures such as August Sander, Bernd and Hilla Becher, and Thomas Ruff. Presented in collaboration with the Museum im Kulturspeicher Würzburg, the show also reflects Grossberg’s biography, linking the places that shaped his life and career.

In autumn, the museum shifts its focus to pattern, repetition, and visual order with Beautiful & strict: the power of ornament. From Henri Matisse to today, running from 10 October 2026 to 14 February 2027. This exhibition traces how ornament has moved from the margins of artistic discourse to become a central tool for thinking about structure, meaning, and cultural identity.

Drawing on the strength of the Von der Heydt Museum’s modern painting collection, the exhibition highlights how artists from Matisse and August Macke onward transformed color, surface, and pattern into the core of their practice. Ornament, once dismissed as decorative excess, emerges here as a powerful visual language—one capable of expressing order and play, simplicity and complexity, tradition and critique.

The exhibition extends into contemporary art, where artists such as Philip Taaffe, Katja Davar, Thomas Bayrle, Nevin Aladağ, and Susan Hefuna use patterns and repetitions to reflect on globalization, migration, and cultural exchange. In a world overwhelmed by images, ornament appears not as distraction but as a strategy for slowing down, for finding clarity, and for reconnecting visual pleasure with critical thought.

Together, the two exhibitions outline a programme that is both reflective and forward-looking. By revisiting Grossberg’s sober vision of modernity and exploring ornament as a living, migratory form, the Von der Heydt Museum positions 2026 as a year of careful looking—one that invites visitors to reconsider how images shape the way we understand the world around us.