Hamburger Bahnhof

Description

Located in the centre of Berlin, the Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart houses a museum of contemporary art in the historic reception building of the former Hamburger Bahnhof. As a site of the Berlin Nationalgalerie it presents both permanent displays and temporary exhibitions by contemporary artists and recorded around 357,000 visitors in 2024.

The foundations for the institution were laid when parts of the important Erich-Marx-Sammlung were shown at the Neue Nationalgalerie in 1982. In the mid-1980s Marx offered his private collection on a permanent basis; subsequently the Berliner Senat decided in 1987 to use the listed station building as a museum for contemporary art. After extensive renovation and redesign the house opened in November 1996 with a solo exhibition and has since been, alongside the Museum für Gegenwart, the location of a Joseph-Beuys-Medienarchiv.

The collection begins chronologically in the 1960s and combines holdings of the Nationalgalerie with the Sammlung Marx, the Sammlung Marzona, the Friedrich Christian Flick Collection and further acquisitions. The core is the Sammlung Marx, shown as a permanent loan since 1996, with around 150 paintings and about 500 drawings, including major works by Joseph Beuys and Andy Warhol. In 2004 the Friedrich Christian Flick Collection was added as a loan; its arrival prompted debates about the origin of the funds from an entrepreneur’s estate. In several donations hundreds of works were later transferred to the museum; at the same time contractual questions and changes of location led to returns and reorganisations of individual loans.

The institution presents works by numerous international artists and also expands its holdings through sponsorship initiatives and purchased works by contemporary positions. Since 2023 the so-called „Unendliche Ausstellung“ comprises more than twenty permanently displayed installations, sculptures and interventions, distributed throughout all parts of the building and the exterior areas, including large-scale light installations and site-specific interventions.

The reception building on Invalidenstraße in the Moabit district is one of the oldest preserved terminus station buildings in Germany; its architectural history dates back to the 1840s. After changes of use and war damage, the complex was converted for museum purposes from the late 1980s and extended up to 1996. The adjacent Rieckhallen, originally freight and transshipment halls and known as such since the 1960s, served until the 2000s as a large exhibition area (approximately 330 metres in length, about 6,000 m²) and were connected to the museum by an artistically designed bridge link. Following negotiations by the city of Berlin their usage status changed; this necessitated further relocations of the collections shown there.