2025: Best Special Art Exhibitions in Berlin State Museums

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by Henk Bekker

in Berlin, Germany, N24

In 2025, the Berlin State Museums will stage several special temporary art exhibitions to complement the world-class permanent collections.

In 2025, the Berlin State Museums will stage several special temporary art exhibitions to complement the world-class permanent collections.

The top temporary art exhibitions in the Berlin State Museums in 2025 range from old masters visiting from Ukraine to Surrealism and the Bizarre. Twentieth-century art will feature prominently in Berlin in 2025. Impressionist paintings from the Scharf Collection, sculptures by Camile Claudel, and drawings from The Blue Rider are likely to be very popular. Admission to the temporary exhibitions is usually included in general admission tickets and covered by the Berlin Museum Pass or area passes (Kulturforum or Museums Insel). Most museums in Berlin are free on the first Sunday of the month.

Top Special Temporary Art Exhibitions in Berlin State Museums in 2025

The top temporary art exhibitions organized by the Berlin State Museums Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (SMB) in 2025 are:

  • From Odesa to Berlin. European Painting of the 16th to 19th Century (Kulturforum, Gemäldegalerie: 24 January – 22 June 2025)
  • The Cosmos of Der Blaue Reiter. From Kandinsky to Campendonk (Kulturforum, Kupferstichkabinett: 28 February – 15 June 2025)
  • The Angel of History. Walter Benjamin, Paul Klee, and the Berlin Angel 80 Years After the End of the War (working title) (Museumsinsel Berlin, Bode-Museum: Early May – mid-July 2025)
  • Lygia Clark. Retrospective (Kulturforum, Neue Nationalgalerie: 23 May – 12 October 2025)
  • Camille Claudel and Bernhard Hoetger. Emancipation from Rodin (Museumsinsel Berlin, Alte Nationalgalerie: 6 June – 28 September 2025)
  • From Max Ernst to Dorothea Tanning ‒ Networks of Surrealism (Kulturforum, Neue Nationalgalerie: 26 September 2025 – 25 January 2026)
  • Goya – Monet – Degas – Bonnard – Grosse: The Scharf Collection (Museumsinsel Berlin, Alte Nationalgalerie: 24 October 2025 – 1 March 2026)
  • BIZARRE! The Art History of the Craziest Word in the World (Kulturforum, Kunstbibliothek: November 2025 – March 2026)
  • No More Masterpieces (Sammlung Scharf-Gerstenberg: 19 December 2025 – 26 April 2026)

For contemporary art exhibitions in 2025 see Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart.

Tickets and Venues for Berlin Art Exhibitions in 2025

The special art exhibitions of the Berlin State Museums in 2025 are unlikely to be blockbusters requiring time-slot reservations. Admission to the temporary exhibitions is often included in general admission tickets. Temporary exhibitions are usually covered by the Berlin Museum Pass and area passes (Kulturforum or Museums Insel) while admission is mostly free on the first Sunday of the month.

Many temporary art exhibitions are staged in Berlin’s Kulturforum near Potsdamer Platz and the Berliner Philharmonie. Smaller museums use the exhibition halls in the Kulturforum (near the general ticket desk and entrance to the Gemäldegalerie).

Art exhibitions on Museum Island are usually in the Greek temple-like Alte Nationalgalerie or in the Bode-Museum (even if not visiting, go in to see the lovely domed foyer).

Top Temporary Art Exhibitions in Berlin Kulturforum in 2025

Upper Hall of the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin

The venues usually used by the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (SMB) for temporary exhibitions in the Kulturforum are:

  • Gemäldegalerie — a special exhibition space in the center of the museum, so admission includes general admission to the Paintings Gallery too.
  • Exhibition Spaces in the Kulturforum — smaller exhibition rooms in the main building often used by the Kupferstichkabinett and Art Library. Separate exhibition-specific tickets.
  • Neue Nationgalerie — temporary exhibitions are inside the Mies van der Rohe-designed New National Gallery. Larger exhibitions are in the glass hall on the ground floor, while several further exhibition rooms are in the basement next to the permanent exhibition. Time-slot reservations are sometimes required for the upper (glass) hall.

Gemäldegalerie

From Odesa to Berlin. European Painting of the 16th to 19th Century /  Von Odesa nach Berlin. Europäische Malerei des 16. bis 19. Jahrhunderts 

Domenico Morelli, Porträt der Gräfin Elena Tolstaja
© Odesa Museum für Westliche und Östliche Kunst / Christoph Schmidt

24 January – 22 June 2025 

On 24 February 2022, following the onset of Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, the staff of the Odesa Museum of Western and Eastern Art packed up the museum’s most valuable paintings and moved them to an emergency storage facility in Ukraine. In September 2023, as part of a cooperation project between the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin and the Odesa Museum, 74 of these artworks were successfully removed from the perils of war and brought to the safety of Berlin’s Gemäldegalerie. The collection features a number of prominent Western European artists from the 16th to 19th centuries, including Francesco Granacci, Roelant Savery, Bernardo Strozzi, Cornelis de Heem, and Andreas Achenbach.

This special exhibition brings 60 major artworks from Odesa and 25 works from the painting collections of Berlin’s museums into a dialogue to offer new insight into art-historical and cultural-historical contexts.

Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin Art Exhibitions 2025

The Neue Nationalgalerie (New National Gallery) is in the Mies van der Rohe-designed museum in the Kulturforum area. The semi-permanent collection — currently ZerreiĂźprobe / Extreme Tension, art from 1945 to 2000 — is in the basement area, which also has smaller temporary exhibition spaces. Exhibitions in the large glass-walled upper hall often require a surcharge and sometimes time-slot reservation tickets:

Lygia Clark. Retrospective / Lygia Clark. Retrospektive 

Lygia Clark with her “Unidades” at the Neoconcrete Exhibition at Berlin Special art exhibitions in 2025
© Cultural Association “The World of Lygia Clark”

23 May – 12 October 2025 in the upper hall of the Neue Nationalgalerie

The Neue Nationalgalerie will show Brazilian artist Lygia Clark’s first retrospective in Germany in the prestigious upper hall of the gallery. With around 150 artworks, the comprehensive show will present her oeuvre from the 1950s to the 1980s, ranging from geometric-abstract paintings to participatory sculptures and performances.

Lygia Clark (1920–1988) is regarded as a radical innovator who pushed the boundaries of what is considered art. She fundamentally redefined the relationship between artist and viewer, artwork and space. As a leading figure of Neoconcretismo (the Neo-Concrete movement), initiated in Rio de Janeiro in 1959, Clark understood art as an organic phenomenon. She demanded a subjective, body-related and sensual art experience, which included the viewer’s active participation. This participatory approach within Clark’s work will be available for visitors to experience through interaction with exhibition copies of sculptures and sensory objects.

Organized in cooperation with the Kunsthaus Zürich, where the show will be on view from autumn 2025 to spring 2026. (Tickets are most likely much cheaper in Berlin!)

From Max Ernst to Dorothea Tanning ‒ Networks of Surrealism. Provenances from the Ulla and Heiner Pietzsch Collection / Von Max Ernst bis Dorothea Tanning. Netzwerke des Surrealismus. Provenienzen der Sammlung Ulla und Heiner Pietzsch 

Tanning Dorothea: Voltage 1942
Jochen Littkemann © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2024/25

26 September 2025 – 25 January 2026 in the Neue Nationalgalerie

A century after the first “Surrealist Manifesto” (1924), this exhibition provides new insights into the extensive networks of artists, art dealers, and collectors in this international, early 20th-century art movement. The starting point for the presentation was a two-year research project of the Federal State of Berlin and the Stiftung Preußicher Kulturbesitz (SPK, Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation) investigating provenances of works from the Ulla and Heiner Pietzsch Collection, which now belongs to the Neue Nationalgalerie.

The exhibition traces the eventful journeys of these paintings and sculptures across space and time ‒ from Paris, the Surrealist movement’s place of origin, to Brussels and other European cities, across the National Socialist era and the Second World War, to South America as well as into exile in the United States. The object biographies of the individual works tell of friendships, collecting passions and industry connections, as well as from loss, persecution, and new beginnings. Beyond the histories of the individual artworks, they elucidate the Surrealist movement’s multifaceted networks and the political challenges of the times. 

A special exhibition of the Neue Nationalgalerie and the Zentralarchiv – Staatliche Museen zu Berlin 

Kulturforum, Kupferstichkabinett 

The top exhibition of the Kupferstichkabinett (Museum of Prints and Drawings) in 2025 covers The Blue Rider movement. Items on display will mostly not be paintings, of which the world’s largest collection is on display in the Lenbachhaus Museum in Munich.

The Cosmos of Der Blaue Reiter. From Kandinsky to Campendonk / Kosmos Blauer Reiter. Von Kandinsky bis Campendonk 

Franz Marc: Ruhende Pferde
© Kupferstichkabinett, SMB / Jörg. P. Anders

28 February – 15 June 2025 in the exhibition rooms of the Kulturforum

For the very first time, Berlin’s Kupferstichkabinett is dedicating a large-scale exhibition to the art of Der Blaue Reiter, which was founded in Munich in 1911. Despite suffering losses during the Nazi era, it is still possible to showcase the expansive cosmos of Der Blaue Reiter via the museum’s own collection, thanks to the many acquisitions made after 1945.

In addition to early works by Wassily Kandinsky and expressive animal paintings by Franz Marc – including postcards sent to Else Lasker-Schüler – the exhibition also features watercolors by August Macke and Heinrich Campendonk. Works by André Derain, Robert Delaunay, and Natalia Goncharova attest to the unique role played by Der Blaue Reiter – via its exhibition activities in the years preceding the First World War – as a kind of force field that united artists from across Germany and Europe.

The creative potential of Russian-illustrated broadsheets and Bavarian votive tablets also became a focal point during this period. In Berlin, Herwarth Walden and his gallery Der Sturm helped to disseminate the art of both Der Blaue Reiter and Jacoba van Heemskerck, who was influenced by the group. 

Kunstbibliothek, Kulturforum

The Kunstbibliothek (Art Library) uses the Kulturforum exhibition rooms (near the Gemäldegalerie ticket desk) for exhibitions.

BIZARRE! The Art History of the Craziest Word in the World / BIZARR! Die Kunstgeschichte des verrücktesten Wortes der Welt 

Allegorie: Storch mit Strohhut
© Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Kunstbibliothek

November 2025 – March 2026 in the exhibition rooms of the Kulturforum

Since the Renaissance, “bizarre” has been the ultimate description of realities that radically question the order of the world: exceptional psychological states, dreams, monstrosities, and hair-raising behavior, but also daring ideas and ingenious creations.

The exhibition at the Kunstbibliothek is the first of its kind. It explores the term’s origins, following its career from the artists’ studios and scholars’ dens of the early modern period up to present-day consciousness research and quantum physics.

In the 21st century, the now more than 500-year-old history of the bizarre has reached a new peak: An idea in art becomes the concept behind the world, in which the “bizarre” is perhaps the last reliable factor. Bizarre! is an adventurous journey of discovery through the Kunstbibliothek’s book and museum collections, featuring more than 150 fantastical objects from the history of the visual arts, architecture, fashion, photography, design, and book and media arts. Many bizarre visual ideas are making their public debut in this exhibition. 

Temporary Art Exhibitions on Museum Island Berlin in 2025

The two main Berlin State Museums on Berlin’s Museum Island dedicated to fine art (rather than cultural and historical objects) are the Bode-Museum (especially sculptures) and the Alte Nationalgalerie (19th-century European art).

The Angel of History. Walter Benjamin, Paul Klee, and the Berlin Angel 80 Years After the End of the War / Der Engel der Geschichte. Walter Benjamin, Paul Klee und die Berliner Engel 80 Jahre nach Kriegsende 

Paul Klee, Angelus Novus, 1920
© The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Elie Posner

Early May – mid-July 2025 in the Bode-Museum on Museumsinsel Berlin

At the heart of the exhibition is a seminal artwork of the 20th century: Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus (1920), which was once owned by the Berlin-born philosopher Walter Benjamin (1892–1940). The artwork accompanied him into exile and was described by Benjamin in one of his final texts as an “angel of history”. Borne aloft by a storm described as progress, the angel flies into the future, only to turn its back on it: its gaze is fixed on the past.

In addition to this watercolor by Klee – which, as an exception, was able to be borrowed from the Israel Museum in Jerusalem – and the manuscripts of the aforementioned text by Benjamin, which are on loan from the Akademie der Künste in Berlin, the exhibition brings together several angels from Berlin museums that were damaged or burned during the Second World War, starting with the famous and now lost Saint Matthew and the Angel by Caravaggio, which will be exhibited here in the form of a projection.

The exhibition will also feature excerpts from Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire (1987), a film in which two angels stand watch over a divided Berlin and in which explicit reference is made to Klee’s watercolor and Benjamin’s interpretation of the artwork. 

Camille Claudel and Bernhard Hoetger. Emancipation from Rodin / Camille Claudel und Bernhard Hoetger. Emanzipation von Rodin 

Camille Claudel bei der Arbeit
Philippe Ledru / akg-images

6 June – 28 September 2025 in the Alte Nationalgelarie on Museumsinsel Berlin

This exhibition at the Alte Nationalgalerie is the first since 1905 to bring together the works of two artist personalities whose works and paths crossed time and again in Paris: Camille Claudel (1864–1943) and Bernhard Hoetger (1874–1949). Both artists were united by their aspirations to seek recognition while simultaneously turning away from the master of French sculpture, Auguste Rodin (1840–1917).

In the pressure cooker that was Modernism, both the French sculptress and the German sculptor, who was ten years younger, developed an artistic vitality, garnering inter-national appeal that continues to have an impact today. 

A special exhibition of the Nationalgalerie – Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, of the Paula Modersohn-Becker Museum Bremen and the Musée Camille Claudel Nogent-sur-Seine. 

Goya – Monet – Degas – Bonnard – Grosse: The Scharf Collection  

Claude Monet, Waterloo Bridge, 1903 on show in special art exhibitions in Berlin in 2025
© The Scharf Collection, Ruland Photodesign

24 October 2025 – 1 March 2026 in the Alte Nationalgalerie on Berlin’s Museum Island

The Scharf Collection, a private German collection of 19th- and 20th-century French art and contemporary international art, is set to be presented in its entirety for the very first time. Now managed by the fourth generation of the family, it maintains a branch of Berlin’s prominent Otto Gerstenberg collection, which spans the entire spectrum from the early days of modernism with Goya to the French avant-garde of the second half of the 19th century with Gustave Courbet and Edgar Degas and the entire graphic oeuvre of Toulouse-Lautrec.

Despite suffering a number of wartime losses, Gerstenberg’s daughter Margarethe Scharf was able to save most of the collection and bequeath it to her two sons Walther and Dieter Scharf. After dividing the collection among the grandchildren, Walther Scharf, his wife Eve, and son René opted to pursue the French focus and expanded the collection with works from a range of French artists including Claude Monet, Paul Cézanne, Pierre Bonnard, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso. Today, René Scharf and his wife Christiane have turned their focus to contemporary international art, with works including those by Sam Francis, Daniel Richter and Katharina Grosse.

A special exhibition of the Alte Nationalgalerie – Staatliche Museen zu Berlin in cooperation with the Kunstpalast Düsseldorf 

Sammlung Scharf-Gerstenberg 

The Sammlung Scharf-Gerstenberg is one of the smaller Berlin State Museums. It is located near Schloss Charlottenburg and the Museum Berggruen in the western suburbs of Berlin. It focuses on 20th-century and Surrealist art.

No More Masterpieces / Schluss mit den Meisterwerken 

Beuys La rivoluzione siamo noi
© SMB, Nationalgalerie / Thomas Bruns

19 December 2025 – 26 April 2026 in the Sammlung Scharf-Gerstenberg 

“No More Masterpieces” (a battle cry from the well-known Surrealist Antonin Artaud) dedicates itself to the action-oriented side of Surrealism and its impact that is still felt today.

The exhibition addresses the notion of destruction (in collages by Hannah Höch and Kurt Schwitters, Otto Dix’s Skatspieler and again more recently in Gerhard Richter’s patched-up Party Guests), the question of power (Schlichter’s Blinde Macht versus Niki de Saint Phalle’s Tod des Patriarchen), the solitary figure (Germaine Richier, Alberto Giacometti) and finally the call for rebellion Georg Baselitz and Eugen Schönebeck put forth in their Pandämonisches Manifest pamphlet, with its direct reference to Surrealism.

The actions of the Situationists and the student revolts in Paris and elsewhere in France conclude the show. “La rivoluzione siamo noi” (“We are the Revolution”, Joseph Beuys) declared people’s thoughts and actions as art – in the spirit of Surrealism, which never wanted to be an art style, but rather a mindset or a way of life. 

See also the Scharf Collection special exhibition in the Alte Nationalgalerie on Museum Island from 24 October 2025 to 1 March 2026.

More on the Berlin State Museums (Staatliche Museen zu Berlin):

Note new opening times for many Berlin museums since mid-April 2024 — several are now closed on both Monday and Tuesday.

Timeslot reservations are sensible (and sometimes needed in busy periods) for the Alte Nationalgalerie, Gemäldegalerie, Neue Nationalgalerie, Neues Museum, and Pergamon – Das Panorama. (The Pergamon Museum itself is closed until 2027!). Timeslots are released only a few weeks in advance. Online tickets are available from GetYourGuide or SMB.

Many passes and multi-museum tickets offer savings (Kulturforum / Museums Island). Individual museum ticket prices range from €8 to €14 (€20 for special exhibitions). Online tickets are skip-the-line — go directly to the gallery entrance to scan the code.

For more general information on the Berlin State Museums:

News & Temporary Exhibitions in Berlin in 2024 & 2025:

More Museum Reviews and Museum-Specific Information:

Previous Temporary Exhibitions in Berlin Museums:

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