ART COLOGNE

This summer in Hamburg. ❤️

Melike Kara (*1985, Bergisch Gladbach, lives and works in Cologne) takes over Kunsthaus Hamburg with Whispers — a solo exhibition that marks a genuine turning point in her practice.

Kara's work begins where so many important things begin: in what is at risk of disappearing. Her Kurdish-Alevi roots, the everyday moments and landscapes of a culture under pressure, the ornamental language of Kurdish tapestries translated into painting and spatial installation. For years she has collected, archived and transformed these fragments into art that makes the beauty of Kurdish traditions visible — beyond pain and persecution.

Whispers asks something harder. For this exhibition Kara burns photographs from her own archive and transfers them into the space as ash. What remains are traces — fragments of images that resist being fixed. A frieze of coffee grounds runs through the room like a sediment of the past. Plants grow. Coffee seeps from the walls and collects in basins. Identity as something that never stops changing.

An expansive installation developed specifically for Kunsthaus Hamburg, part of the 9th Triennial of Photography Hamburg 2026. A body of work that already belongs to the collection of Museum Ludwig, acquired at ART COLOGNE 2024. An artist at the height of her powers, represented by Galerie Jan Kaps, Cologne.

📌 Melike Kara — Whispers
📅 5 June – 23 August 2026
📍 Kunsthaus Hamburg

See you in Cologne this November.
ART COLOGNE: 5-8 November 2026 | Koelnmesse - Köln Messe/Deutz

Image:
Studio shot, 2025, © Melike Kara, Photo: Şirin Şimşek

Your week in Cologne and beyond — three good reasons to get out and about.

Opening Wednesday 3 June at 18:00: Arthur Löwen, Formula at fiebach, minninger, Venloer Str. 26. Löwen negotiates meaning and non-meaning through symbolic traces, imprints, folded printed cloth and thrown objects. A painter who makes you look twice at what a mark actually is. Through 11 July.

Last chance this week: Kirstin Arndt, Verschränkungen at Rehbein Galerie, closing Saturday 6 June. Aluminium that folds like paper, wood interlocked like oversized Mikado sticks, textile under tension that becomes rigid. How little line does it take to make a surface? See it before the answer disappears.

And this Sunday 7 June at 16:00 in Darmstadt: the finnissage of Annegret Soltau, Vatersuche at Kunstforum TU Darmstadt. One of the most important feminist artists of the post-war period, shown in full — her lifelong search for the father she never met. Galerie Anita Beckers brought her work to ART COLOGNE 2025 in dialogue with Jürgen Klauke. One last chance.

-
ART COLOGNE: 5-8 November 2026 | Koelnmesse - Köln Messe/Deutz
-

Images:
Kirstin Arndt: Ohne Titel / Untitled, 2015. Aluminum, powder-coated, magenta.
Arthur Löwen, Index (Synchron 10), 2026. Acrylic on canvas. Credit: Jens Ge**er
Annegret Soltau. Vatersuche - installation view at Kunstforum Tu Darmstadt. Credit: André Hirtz.

This is your Cologne weekend. Three openings and one last chance visit.

Galerie Alex Serra: Adriana Molder, The Return of Judith. Opening tonight, 18:00–21:00. Through 18 July.

Molder works in Indian ink on tracing paper — monumental figures and faces moving between shadow and sudden beauty. In this new series she returns to Botticelli's Judith, dissolving the figure into black paper silhouettes full of movement, surrounded by moulded canvas paintings that hang from the ceiling and walls as if fallen from the dark. Drawing, painting and sculpture in one room. Strong, victorious, quietly unsettling. Her Cologne debut.

Zander Galerie: Clark Winter, Untold Stories. First solo exhibition in Germany of black-and-white photographs from the 1970s — America, Italy, Spain, a Leica and an open eye. Opening Saturday at 15:00, introduction by the artist at 16:00. Through 21 August.

Berthold Pott: Free Space. 15 years. Every artist in the programme, each one choosing the work they wanted to show — no curatorial brief, no restrictions, just trust. The result is a portrait of the gallery as its artists see it. Opening Saturday 18:00–22:00, with a talk by Prof. Dr. Stephan Berg at 19:00. Isabelle Andriessen, Daniel Boccato, Samuel François, Max Frintrop, Manor Grunewald, Agata Ingarden, Johanna von Monkiewitsch, Colin Penno, Benoît Platéus, Eva Robarts, Loup Sarion, Lucia Sotnikova. Fifteen years well spent.

Last chance today: Will Stovall, Limping Devil at DREI. A 17th century Spanish devil lifts the rooftops of Madrid — Stovall brings that gaze into the age of surveillance. Closes Saturday 30 May.

-
ART COLOGNE: 5-8 November 2026 | Koelnmesse - Köln Messe/Deutz

Images:
Clark Winter: Look, No Look, 1971. At Zander Galerie
Adriana Molder: exhibition view at Galerie Alex Serra
Berthold Pott: Free Space
Will Stovall: La carne del pastelón de Madrid, 2026. At DREI

Sophie von Hellermann: Letters to a Young Painter. Wentrup Galerie, Berlin. Through 13 June.

2026 is Rilke's year — 150th birthday, 100th anniversary of his death, both falling at once. Von Hellermann has taken that coincidence seriously. Her new paintings grow from a long engagement with his life and work, and the connection makes sense: both painter and poet work with suggestion rather than statement, mood rather than narrative, figures that remain deliberately unfinished.

Von Hellermann paints without sketches or preliminary drawings, which means every canvas carries the energy of a first and final decision simultaneously. Mythology, literature, film, memory — woven together and then immediately committed to paint. The result is dreamlike without being vague, and figurative without being fixed.
A painter at full stretch, on the right subject, in the right year.

-
ART COLOGNE: 5-8 November 2026 | Koelnmesse - Köln Messe/Deutz

Too Sure of the Sun. Adam Lupton at Galerie Judin, Die Tankstelle, Berlin. Through 14 June.

Lupton paints domestic interiors in blue and red only — a self-imposed restriction that turns out to be a form of total freedom. Bedrooms, bathrooms, kitchen tables, the edge of a bed. Figures that are formally always himself, yet instantly universal. The man in the bathtub studying painted tiles of wrestlers. The endless to-do list inscribed across a torso. A sock with a toe poking through.

His studio coveralls, wiped clean of every session's blue and red, have gradually become the same palette as his paintings. Stand him in front of one and he nearly disappears.

OCD, anxiety, the quiet weight of daily existence, the domestic sphere as both refuge and cage — Lupton doesn't announce these themes, he furnishes them. Each canvas is a small world you feel you've already lived in.

And - you can also head to Die Tankstelle tonight: Jorinde Voigt is in conversation with Monopol editor-in-chief Elke Buhr in the gallery garden at 19:00. Free entry. Her exhibition Non Fiction is on view at Galerie Judin, Mercator-Höfe, through 6 June. A good Friday evening, whichever door you walk through.

-
ART COLOGNE: 5-8 November 2026 | Koelnmesse - Köln Messe/Deutz

Mid-week. Perfect moment to visit a gallery.

Here are three Cologne galleries who have good
reasons to get you off the couch right now.

📍 Galerie Christian Lethert, Antwerpener Str. 52 —
Imi Knoebel. New works spanning twenty years,
including three large paintings shown for the
first time. Colour as structure, aluminium as
canvas. A Düsseldorf master at full force.
Through 19 June.

📍 Clages, Brüsseler Str. 5 —
Shila Khatami: One Move. Large-scale paintings
that move fast and land hard — May 1st,
Black Thursday, Dark Line (Femicide Tempelhof).
Khatami paints the city and its politics in
one decisive gesture. Through 13 June.

📍 Jan Kaps, Lindenstrasse 20 —
Berenice Olmedo: Phorá. Sculptures born from
prosthetic and orthotic sockets — scanned,
reproduced, repositioned. Their copper and
silver surfaces oxidized like a reactive skin.
Forms that carry the memory of what they once
supported, and have since moved far beyond it.
Through 3 June.

All within walking distance of each other. Do it in one afternoon.

Images:
IMI KNOEBEL - Poem 2026-005, 2026 | Corten-Steel, 28-parts, 168.3 x 132.2 x 2 cm. At Galerie Christian Lethert.
Shila Khatami - One up, 2026. Acrylic on canvas, 130 x 100 cm. At Clages.
Berenice Olmedo - installation view of the exhibition. At Jan Kaps.

Today is International Museum Day. NRW delivers.

A cactus that holds your coat.
Two Germanys seen through the same lens.
Secrets made productive.
A British artist in dialogue with a 1923 mural.
An outdoor playground where Olafur Eliasson wants you to build with LEGO and — remember it from Art Cologne 2025? — Elmgreen & Dragset put up a road sign that means nothing — or the whole world.

This is what museums do on a good day. Today is a very good day.

📍 MAKK Köln — The Cactus coat stand, 1972.
Guido Drocco & Franco Mello for Gufram.
Radical Italian design that asked: why should form follow function?

📍 Museum Ludwig, Köln — Zweimal Deutschland um 1980. Seven photographers.
Two political systems. Surprisingly hard to tell apart.
Kusama is there too — see our earlier post.

📍 Kolumba, Köln — Free entry today, 12–17h.
Make the secrets productive. Start here.

📍 Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn — INTERACTIONS 2026.
Free, open air, open until November. Carsten Höller's slide is back.

📍 Kaiser Wilhelm Museum, Krefeld — Emma Talbot: Psyche opens today.
Silk paintings, life cycles, a conversation with Thorn Prikker across a century.

📍 Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, Köln - Closing this summer for two years.
Today is a beautiful moment to visit.
And at 11:00: a guided tour called "Art Cologne vor 600 Jahren."
We always knew we were the first.

Museums uniting a divided world — that's the motto this year. NRW is doing its part.

1 - Cactus: © Rheinisches Bildarchiv, Marion Mennicken
2 - Cristiane Eisler, Heike, 1983. Museum Ludwig Köln. © Christiane Eisler, Repro: Historisches Archiv mit Rheinischem Bildarchiv.
3 - Works by René Zäch and Bettina Gruber. © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. At Kolumba.
4 - Elmgreen & Dragset, Camouflaged, Fig. 8, 2024.
5 - Installation view Sammlungssatellit #10: Emma Talbot. Psyche. Kaiser Wilhelm Museum 2026. © the artist, Galerie Onrust. Photo: Dirk Rose
6 - Edvard Munch, Vier Mädchen auf der Brücke, Wallraf-Richartz-Museum & Fondation Corboud (WRM 2816, Köln). © Historisches Archiv mit Rheinischem Bildarchiv, rba_d000208

R.I.P. VALIE EXPORT (1940–2026)

She replaced the screen with skin. She wrote her name in capitals as an act of reinvention. She placed her body against architecture, into landscape, onto the street — and asked what it meant to occupy space as a woman. Few artists changed the language of art as fundamentally, or as fearlessly.

From 1995 to 2005 she taught at the Academy of Media Arts here in Cologne. Her work has been shown at ART COLOGNE across many editions, with galleries including Thaddaeus Ropac. This city was part of her story.

We bow our heads and celebrate everything she made possible.

Seen here: Body Configurations — Vertikal Gel, Zupassung, Einfügung, 1976 — which entered the Museum Ludwig collection via Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac at ART COLOGNE 2021.

Image credits:
VALIE EXPORT, Vertikal Gel, 1976. Schwarzweißfotografie, 41 x 60,7 (Blatt) & 56 x 79 cm (Rahmen). Köln, Museum Ludwig, Sammlung Fotografie, Inv.-Nr. ML/F 2021/0017, Ankauf 03.12.2021
VALIE EXPORT, ZUPASSUNG, 1976. Schwarzweißfotografie, 41 x 60,7 (Blatt) & 56 x 79 cm (Rahmen). Köln, Museum Ludwig, Sammlung Fotografie, Inv.-Nr. ML/F 2021/0018, Ankauf 03.12.2021
VALIE EXPORT, EINFÜGUNG, Museum Ludwig (ML/F 2021/0026, Köln)
(Foto: © Historisches Archiv mit Rheinischem Bildarchiv, 2022.10.13, rba_d058455)
VALIE EXPORT, (picture alliance / dpa / Monika Skolimowska)

On a boat in Venice? Berlin is loud on Karl-Marx-Allee.

Capitain Petzel is showing Rodney McMillian: In Other Realms — his first solo exhibition with the gallery.

McMillian is a Los Angeles-based artist whose practice spans painting, sculpture, installation, performance and text. His Black Paintings are among his best-known works: heavily worked surfaces of vinyl and fabric, folded, seamed, painted in black that is never merely formal. They speak to Black identity, visibility and invisibility, and to the social and historical power structures that run through both American society and art history. An ongoing, urgent conversation with the tradition of abstract painting — and a challenge to what that tradition preferred not to see.

The exhibition is anchored by a new film, Plantation Bride, in which McMillian performs a speech by Ida B. Wells-Barnett, the journalist and civil rights activist who campaigned against lynching. The speech was originally delivered at the first annual conference of the NAACP in 1909. Around it, new sculptures and paintings open into what Monopol describes as utopian counter-proposals to a disturbingly current dystopia.

📌 On view through 13 June.