BERLIN.- The Alte Nationalgalerie has opened InterNationalgalerie#1 – National Museum in Warsaw, the first exhibition in a new cabinet series that will invite national galleries and museums from around the world to present works from their collections in Berlin. The exhibition, on view through January 17, 2027, marks the beginning of a long-term program that looks beyond national borders to ask how museums tell their histories, shape their identities, and respond to the changing cultural questions of the present.

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The National Museum in Warsaw: Painting

A museum volume from the National Museum in Warsaw

Explore highlights from the National Museum in Warsaw’s painting collection, featuring works that trace centuries of European and Polish art.

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The series begins with the National Museum in Warsaw, one of Poland’s largest and oldest museum institutions. Under the title Inventing Myths, Agnieszka Lajus, director of the National Museum in Warsaw, in conversation with Anette Hüsch, director of the Alte Nationalgalerie, selected eight works that trace Poland’s changing cultural and political conditions across three centuries.

The exhibition explores themes of freedom, art, and the life of the artist from the 19th century to the present day. Among the highlights is Polish Hamlet – Portrait of Aleksander Wielopolski, painted in 1903 by Jacek Malczewski, widely regarded as Poland’s most important Symbolist painter. Through this and the other selected works, the presentation reflects on how national identity is not fixed, but constantly shaped and reshaped by history, memory, conflict, and imagination.

The launch of InterNationalgalerie also invites visitors to reconsider the history of the Alte Nationalgalerie itself. When Emperor Wilhelm I opened the “National-Galerie” in 1876, the inscription “Der deutschen Kunst” — “To German Art” — appeared on the building’s pediment. Yet from the beginning, the institution’s collection was never exclusively German. The founding donation by banker Joachim Heinrich Wilhelm Wagener, who gave 262 works to the Prussian king and laid the foundation for the museum, included works by Italian, French, Swiss, and Belgian artists alongside German ones.

That international dimension now becomes the starting point for a new conversation. Through InterNationalgalerie, the Alte Nationalgalerie will regularly host national museums and galleries from other countries, giving them space to present selected works and to reflect on the ways their collections are understood today. The project asks how institutions interpret their historical inheritance, how they contextualize their collections, and how they are developing new programs in response to contemporary demands and challenges.

The Warsaw presentation is especially fitting as a first chapter. Poland’s history has been marked by shifting borders, political struggle, cultural resilience, and the continuous reinvention of national narratives. By bringing works from the National Museum in Warsaw into dialogue with the Alte Nationalgalerie, the exhibition opens a space for reflection on how myths are created, preserved, questioned, and transformed through art.





A free brochure with an interview and essays by Agnieszka Lajus and Anette Hüsch accompanies the exhibition, offering further insight into the works on view and the ideas behind the new series.

Alongside InterNationalgalerie#1, the Alte Nationalgalerie has also opened its newly established “Door to History” gallery. Located directly next to the InterNationalgalerie space, the gallery is dedicated to the history of Berlin’s Nationalgalerie and provides visitors with additional context for understanding the museum’s origins, development, and evolving role.

Together, the two presentations place the museum’s past and future in close conversation. One looks inward, tracing the history of the Nationalgalerie in Berlin; the other looks outward, inviting international partners to share how their own collections speak to questions of culture, memory, and identity today.

InterNationalgalerie#1 – National Museum in Warsaw is on view at the Alte Nationalgalerie, Museumsinsel Berlin, through January 17, 2027.