Kunsthalle Bielefeld

The Kunsthalle Bielefeld is a modern and contemporary art museum in Bielefeld, Germany. It was designed by Philip Johnson in 1968, and paid for by the businessman and art patron Rudolf August Oetker.

Initiated in 1950 with a donation by Oetker and gradually expanded from 1954 with municipal acquisitions, the collection focuses on Expressionism, international sculpture, and contemporary art. The permanent collection features a wide array of 20th-century art, including paintings by Pablo Picasso and Max Beckmann, works by the Blaue Reiter group and movements centred on László Moholy-Nagy and Oskar Schlemmer, and more recent art from the 1970s and '80s. The museum stands in a sculpture garden featuring works by Auguste Rodin, Henry Moore, Richard Serra, Ólafur Elíasson and other modern sculptors.

At the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003, the Kunsthalle presented the documentary "Ilya und Emila Kabakov: Die Utopische Stadt. 1997-2003", which was on permanent display in the "Utopia Station Now!". As part of its series of exhibitions of important museum collections of twentieth- and twenty-first-century art, the Bundeskunsthalle Bonn presented »The Unknown Bielefeld Collection« in 2011.

The Kunsthalle also hosts temporary exhibitions to complement the permanent collection. Recent examples have been devoted to Emil Nolde, Rirkrit Tiravanija, and the locally born artist Peter Böckstiegel together with Conrad Felixmüller. The 1991 exhibition "Picasso's Surrealism: 1925–1937", one of five internationally renowned Picasso exhibitions in 1984, 1988, 1993, and 2011, attracted 67,000 visitors; an exhibition in 2007–08, featuring art from 1937 in a variety of styles, had 47,000.

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