Julia Stoschek Foundation to Reopen Düsseldorf HQ in April 2027

By Tom Whitfield

The Julia Stoschek Foundation will reopen its Düsseldorf headquarters in April 2027, the organisation has announced, one month after closing its Berlin exhibition space.

The Düsseldorf building shut for renovation in 2025. The reopening falls on the foundation's 20th anniversary, and the inaugural exhibition in the revamped space will be Selfish in Bed, curated by Krist Gruijthuijsen, formerly director of Berlin's KW Institute for Contemporary Art.

The show takes its title from a 2000 self-portrait by Sarah Lucas and features 43 artists drawn from the foundation's collection. Named participants include Wolfgang Tillmans, Bill Viola, Simon Fujiwara, Rosemarie Trockel and Tracey Emin. It runs from 10 April to 19 December 2027.

The foundation, a nonprofit established by the German collector and businesswoman Julia Stoschek, holds more than 1,000 works focused primarily on time-based art: video, film, moving-image installations, multimedia work, performance, sound and virtual reality.

"Seeing the collection continue to grow and welcoming new audiences two decades on brings me enormous joy," Stoschek said in a statement. "And I can think of no better home for it than Düsseldorf, a city where art has been part of everyday life for generations."

The statement is warm. It is also selective about what it leaves out.

Why did Berlin close?

The foundation's Berlin space operated for ten years, from June 2016 to October 2026. Over that period it hosted 22 exhibitions and drew 500,000 visitors — an average of roughly 50,000 a year, a respectable but not exceptional figure for a free-entry-style contemporary venue in the German capital.

In April, the foundation attributed the closure to a "strategic realignment" and said it would "now focus on international projects in order to make the collection accessible to a global audience."

That language did not specify what the international projects are, who funds them, or whether the Berlin closure was driven by cost. The foundation has not said.

What is known: the Düsseldorf renovation predates the Berlin closure announcement, and the reopened building now carries the institution's entire exhibition programme.

What does this change for time-based art in Germany?

In practice, it concentrates the public display of one of Europe's largest private collections of video and moving-image work in a single city. Berlin loses a dedicated venue for the medium; Düsseldorf regains one, with a curator — Gruijthuijsen — whose record at KW suggests an institution-building brief rather than a caretaker role.

The 43-artist opening exhibition, spanning Tillmans, Viola, Trockel, Emin and Lucas, signals breadth across generations of media art. Whether the "global audience" promised in April materialises, beyond loans and touring projects the foundation has yet to name, remains the open question.

The reopening date is fixed. The strategy behind it is still being filled in.