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Gropius Bau

Gropius Bau 2023

Lehrerführung zur Ausstellung „Kunst der Vorzeit. Felsbilder aus der Sammlung Frobenius“

Guided Tour for Teachers: Art of Prehistoric Times. Rock Paintings from the Frobenius Collection

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Located in the centre of Berlin, the Gropius Bau is a lively place for encounters with art and each other. As an internationally renowned exhibition centre, it offers space for major exhibitions and performances by contemporary artists.

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There are currently no exhibitions on view at Gropius Bau.

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Gropius Bau 2026

Events

Exhibitions & Projects

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Our newsletters keep you updated on current and upcoming exhibitions and events. Learn more about our kids programme and plan your next visit.

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We’re Looking Forward to Welcoming You Again in March!

Gropius Bau is currently closed for exhibition preparations. Our restaurant Beba and our bookstore will reopen on 4 March, before we kick off our spring programme, featuring a performance by <a href="${link:{uuid:{16d14ae2-9463-45b4-91de-95a846c0f377},repository:{website},path:{/bfs-de/gropius-bau/programm/2026/veranstaltungen/leila-hekmat}}}">Leila Hekmat</a>, the <a href="${link:{uuid:{fd3f9e70-97e8-46fb-b639-fc701f8d4039},repository:{website},path:{/bfs-de/gropius-bau/programm/baubau/veranstaltungen/baubau-play-day-pop-up-26}}}">big pop-up</a> of our play space BAUBAU and the opening of our <a href="${link:{uuid:{baa82be9-6411-41e5-806b-4889004c8459},repository:{website},path:{/bfs-de/gropius-bau/programm/2026/ausstellungen/peter-hujar-liz-deschenes}}}">Peter Hujar / Liz Deschenes</a> exhibition. Find more details in our <a href="${link:{uuid:{62c3018b-bb40-46ce-8019-646ec5cd2e4a},repository:{website},path:{/bfs-de/gropius-bau/besuch/informationen}}}">Information &amp; Tickets</a> section.

See You Soon

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Balkan Erotic Epic. The Exhibition

Marina Abramović

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With Andrew Durbin, Biliana Voutchkova, Gary Schneider, Queer Analog Darkroom and Selin Davasse – free admission

Sp&auml;tschicht x C/O Berlin

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Tickets for ten selected concert highlights of the Musikfest Berlin, which in 2026 will also mark the 75th anniversary of the Berliner Festspiele, are available. The programme includes Gy&ouml;rgy Ligeti’s grotesquely humorous anti-opera Le Grand Macabre and George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess.

Musikfest Berlin

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In 2026 the Berliner Festspiele celebrate their 75th anniversary. A selection of events programmed throughout the entire year engage take the anniversary as their theme or mark the occasion with works at the Haus der Berliner Festspiele, the Gropius Bau, the Philharmonie Berlin, on Berlin’s Ringbahn and at other locations in the city.&nbsp;

75 Years of the Berliner Festspiele

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The programme has been published. Advance ticket sales will start on 18&nbsp;April at 10:00.

Theatertreffen

More Berliner Festspiele

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The programme has been published. Tickets are available now. Selected from more than 700&nbsp;productions, Theatertreffen once again presents the 10&nbsp;most remarkable productions of the year in May. The festival is complemented by the new format Mehr Drama! as well as a series of conversations curated by Matthias Dell on aesthetic, social and culture-political issues.

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The Practice – What Moves Artists

The Practice – What Moves Artists&nbsp;is a book series by Gropius Bau that invites artists to showcase a practice that they pursue, that has influenced them or that has been with them for a long time. In the third volume of the series On the Erotic, performance artist Marina Abramović talks about female sexuality after menopause, the eroticism of the masses and her love for the planet.

Marina Abramović: On the Erotic

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A Vibrant Place for Enganging with Art and Each Other

Located in the centre of Berlin, Gropius Bau is a lively place to encounter art and each other. The internationally renowned institution is part of the Berliner Festspiele and stages large-scale exhibitions and performances by contemporary artists, offering new perspectives on our present.

About Gropius Bau

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The Practice – What Moves Artists&nbsp;is a book series by Gropius Bau that invites artists to showcase a practice that they pursue, that has influenced them or that has been with them for a long time. In the second volume of the series, artist, performer and author Vaginal Davis looks back on the saucy underground scenes of Los Angeles and Berlin together with former bandmates.&nbsp;On Dangerous Ground recounts past gigs, spectacular live performances and well-kept secrets.

Vaginal Davis: On Dangerous Ground

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Widely regarded as one of the most original and influential artists of the 20th century, Diane Arbus’ bold black-and-white photographs demolish aesthetic conventions and upend all certainties. With&nbsp;Diane Arbus: Konstellationen, Gropius Bau presents the most comprehensive exhibition of her work to date.

Diane Arbus: Konstellationen

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Ligia Lewis is a central figure in redefining performance within the context of the visual arts. Her solo exhibition&nbsp;I’M NOT HERE FORRRRR… at Gropius Bau&nbsp;brings&nbsp;together new and existing works that explore themes of race, gender, violence and resistance.

Ligia Lewis:I’M NOT HERE FORRRRR...

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With BAUBAU, the artist Kerstin Br&auml;tsch designed an&nbsp;admission-free play space for kids, where more is allowed than forbidden. On Gropius Bau’s ground floor, colourful wallpapers, structures, objects and open-ended material called “loose parts” configure flexible spaces that are shaped by children’s activities.

BAUBAU:A&nbsp;Play Space for Kids

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What is and has been the role of play in public space? Gabriela Burkhalter’s&nbsp;Playing in the City&nbsp;presentation traces the history of playgrounds since their emergence in 1900 to today. The free presentation is open to all and can be seen in two rooms next to BAUBAU’s entrance.

Playing in the City:A Short History from 1900 to the Present

Currently at Gropius Bau

Widely regarded as one of the most original and influential artists of the 20th century, Diane Arbus’ bold black-and-white photographs demolish aesthetic conventions and upend all certainties. With Diane Arbus: Konstellationen, Gropius Bau presents the most comprehensive exhibition of her work to date. Featuring 454 prints, many of them shown here for the first time, Konstellationen offers new perspectives on Arbus’ iconic images and the wide range of her portraiture.

Ligia Lewis is a central figure in redefining performance within the context of the visual arts. In her multifaceted practice, she combines performance, live installation and film. From autumn 2025, Gropius Bau presents I’M NOT HERE FORRRRR…, the artist and choreographer’s most comprehensive solo exhibition to date. It brings together new and existing works that explore themes of race, gender, violence and resistance.

Ligia Lewis: I’M NOT HERE FORRRRR…

Current Exhibitions

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Peter Hujar / Liz Deschenes: Persistence of Vision

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Playing, laughing, making noise, letting off steam, doing nothing – all in an exhibition venue! With BAUBAU, the artist Kerstin Br&auml;tsch designed an&nbsp;admission-free play space for kids, where more is allowed than forbidden. On Gropius Bau’s ground floor, colourful wallpapers, structures, objects and open-ended material called “loose parts” configure flexible spaces that are shaped by children’s activities. They set the tone and decide what happens in this place.

BAUBAU

Spielen in der Stadt

A Short History from 1900 to the Present

What has been the role of play in public space, both historically and in the present? Complementing BAUBAU, our free play space for kids, Gabriela Burkhalter’s Playing in the City presentation traces the history of playgrounds since their emergence in 1900 to today. The free presentation is open to all and can be seen in two rooms next to the play space’s entrance.

Playing in the City

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Marina Abramović, one of the most influential contemporary artists, presents Balkan Erotic Epic. The Exhibition at Gropius Bau, marking her first major solo show in Berlin since the 1990s. The exhibition brings together historical and new works by the performance artist, tracing her ongoing engagement with ritual, eroticism, death and the body as a site of political resistance.

Marina Abramović: Balkan Erotic Epic. The Exhibition

Currently and Upcoming

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With Andrew Durbin, Biliana Voutchkova, Gary Schneider, Queer Analog Darkroom and Selin Davasse

On the occasion of <a href="${link:{uuid:{baa82be9-6411-41e5-806b-4889004c8459},repository:{website},path:{/bfs-de/gropius-bau/programm/2026/ausstellungen/peter-hujar-liz-deschenes}}}">Peter Hujar / Liz Deschenes: Persistence of Vision</a>, Sp&auml;tschicht x C/O Berlin turns its focus on 26 March to photography within the shifting terrains of urban space, visibility, and resistance. Look forward to performances, a workshop, a screening and a reading. Admission is free.

We are looking forward to welcoming you back in mid-March with the reopening of our play space, <a href="${link:{uuid:{df42e57d-a14a-4b44-a5e4-9d3e7dcab5a6},repository:{website},path:{/bfs-de/gropius-bau/programm/baubau}}}">BAUBAU</a> (on 22 March), and two exhibitions, <a href="${link:{uuid:{55d64239-53fe-4b12-8567-a63191c6cae4},repository:{website},path:{/bfs-de/gropius-bau/programm/2025/ausstellungen/vaginal-davis}}}">Vaginal Davis: Fabelhaftes Produkt</a> (from 21 March) and <a href="${link:{uuid:{9618c701-bd05-432e-b688-5943e1f7fc57},repository:{website},path:{/bfs-de/gropius-bau/programm/2025/ausstellungen/yoko-ono}}}">YOKO ONO: MUSIC OF THE MIND</a> (from 11 April). For details on opening hours and tickets, please visit our <a href="${link:{uuid:{62c3018b-bb40-46ce-8019-646ec5cd2e4a},repository:{website},path:{/bfs-de/gropius-bau/besuch/informationen}}}">Information &amp; Tickets</a> page. We look forward to seeing you soon!

See you in March!

Persistence of Vision

Working in New York City between the Stonewall uprising of 1969 and the onset of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s, Peter Hujar captured a pivotal cultural moment in piercing black-and-white photographs. In the exhibition Persistence of Vision, Hujar’s photographs are interspersed with contemporary works by New York City-based artist Liz Deschenes, opening up an intergenerational dialogue on photography.&nbsp;

Peter Hujar / Liz Deschenes

A&nbsp;Play Space for Kids

A Short History from 1900 to the Present

From sandpits to adventure playgrounds, urban play spaces have – throughout their evolution – taken many different forms. What has been the role of play in public space, both historically and in the present? Complementing BAUBAU, our free play space for kids, Gabriela Burkhalter’s Playing in the City presentation traces the history of playgrounds since their emergence in 1900 to today. The free presentation is open to all and can be seen in two rooms next to the play space’s entrance.

Playing in the City &nbsp;

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Located in the centre of Berlin, the Gropius Bau is a lively place to encounter art and each other. The internationally renowned institution stages large-scale exhibitions and performances by contemporary artists.

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Festivals & Programme Series

It also touches on the history of interpreting prehistoric rock art over the last century. The answers to the question about what prehistoric artists originally intended for their works 7,000, 10,000 or 30,000 years ago opens up perspectives on projections typical for the time in the interplay between the evolutionary/functionalistic paradigms and the postulate of deep-rooted basic anthropological dispositions.
Often found in inaccessible locations, caves or deserts, these carved or painted images were made known to a wide audience in cities across Europe and the USA in the form of large-scale painted copies. German ethnologist Leo Frobenius (1873-1938) created the world’s most prominent collection of these copies. Following his sixth trip to Africa in 1912, he began taking painters with him as copyists on his many “German Inner Africa Research Expeditions”. The famous rock art of North Africa, inner Sahara and southern Africa was all copied on site, often involving great hazards. Frobenius later also sent expeditions to European rock-art regions in Spain, France, northern Italy and Scandinavia, as well as to Indonesia and Australia. Until his death in 1938, he amassed a collection of almost 5,000 rock-art copies, in colour and usually in original size (up to 2.5 x 10 metres), which is today housed at the Frobenius Institute at Frankfurt’s Goethe University.
The almost forgotten, spectacular, international exhibition history of these images has only recently been possible to reconstruct: In the 1930s, the copies toured almost all major European cities, as well as 32 American metropolises, being displayed as part of acclaimed exhibitions at Berlin’s Reichstag, Paris’ Trocadéro and New York’s Museum of Modern Art, among others.
As early as 1937, Alfred Barr, the young founding director of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), was convinced that “The art of the twentieth century has already come under the influence of the great traditions of prehistoric rock art”, consequently exhibiting the rock art alongside works by artists such as Klee, Miró, Arp and Masson.
Conversely, the interest of art’s avant-garde played virtually no part in producing the rock-art copies, which were designed as transportable facsimiles, i.e. as pure scientific images, intended to help prove the cultural and historical developments of the earliest prehistory. According to Frobenius, the painters had to “adopt a level of intellectuality and spirituality befitting the past” when copying prehistoric rock art.
Nevertheless, the copyists each also blazed their own trail striking a balance between scientific documentation and artistry. They were well aware of the interest expressed by art’s avant-garde in the prehistoric images. The variety of painting techniques used, and the sometimes experimental attempts at reproducing the structure of the rocky background through colour and texture, and coping with weathered, incomplete motifs, attest to individual styles and contemporary artistic influences.
Over time, the status of the painted copies has changed, from copies, to original copies, into originals. While painting was initially the documentation method of choice since photographs could not yet be taken in colour - not to mention original size - the 1950s and ‘60s saw it become the first of many technological dead-ends in the scientific documentation of prehistoric rock art. The notion of translating 3D to 2D, coupled with their idealisation and dramatisation of motifs, meant painted rock-art copies were soon discredited as scientific images. At the same time, the painted copies increasingly and unwittingly became a unique art form of their own, and a leading fossil of a bygone science era in which art and science were combined more naturally. According to German ethnologist Mark Münzel, the images were a form of “scientific expressionism”.
The exhibition at the Martin-Gropius-Bau also highlights the interplay between art and scientific pictures in the 1920s and ‘30s, showing how copies of rock images became art, and how art was simultaneously influenced by said copies.
The numerous rock images on display spark a lively discussion on the early beginnings of art and human creativity in the contemporary art scene at the time. Some pieces clearly illustrate the effect of these exhibitions. The work of Willi Baumeister, for example, underwent a shift in style around 1929/30, adopting many of the design elements and techniques used in the rock art. The influence is subtler with other artists. While Europe’s surrealists certainly benefited greatly from interacting with prehistoric art, yet the works of Jackson Pollock also contain some allusions.
This exhibition on ancient art as a subject of research and a vital source of inspiration for modernity discusses surprisingly relevant issues.
The Kulturstiftung der Länder, Ernst von Siemens Kunststiftung and Hahn-Hissinck’sche Frobenius-Stiftung all contributed generously to restoration of the works.

“The art of the twentieth century has already come under the influence of the great tradition of prehistoric rock art” 
 Alfred Barr, Director of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), 1937
In addition to the art of the “primitives” (the term used for indigenous peoples at the time) and the “naives” (children and the mentally ill), the quest for original, unspoilt forms of expression in the 1920s and ‘30s gave rise to a third, often neglected source of inspiration for the development of modern art: prehistoric art, particularly the oldest human art tradition, rock art. Around 100 samples, including many large, wall-sized copies from the Frobenius Institute, as well as photographic and archive material, depict the epic history of rock-art documentation in European caves, the central Sahara, the savannahs of Zimbabwe, and the Australian outback. This exhibition examines the impact of these never-before-seen images on modernity, and the manner in which they have inspired artists.

Kunst der Vorzeit

Art of Prehistoric Times

Veranstaltungen Kunst der Vorzeit

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Exhibitions 2016

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Upcoming

The Berliner Festspiele organise a range of festivals and art exhibitions, concerts, dance and theatre performances, readings, lectures, debates and much more throughout the year. These events are presented at a range of locations across Berlin but are concentrated primarily at their own two venues: the Gropius Bau and the Haus der Berliner Festspiele.

Berliner Festspiele

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In 2026 the Berliner Festspiele celebrate their 75th anniversary. A selection of events programmed throughout the entire year engage take the anniversary as their theme or mark the occasion with works at the Haus der Berliner Festspiele, the Gropius Bau, the Philharmonie, on Berlin’s Ringbahn and at other locations in the city. Outstanding international that liberal societies and their cultural institutions face in a new, multipolar world order. artists such as Marina Abramović, Gabriele St&ouml;tzer and Akira Takayama will set the agenda both thematically and aesthetically. Entitled “Die gro&szlig;e Unordnung” (The Great Disorder), the four-day focus Reflexes &amp; Reflections will also enquire about the challenges.

75 Years of the Berliner Festspiele

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The massacre, hostage-taking and rocket attacks by Hamas have shaken us deeply. The grue-some attack on Israel on 7&nbsp;October left us stunned and initially lost for words.

The Berliner Festspiele on Current Events in Israel, Gaza and Germany

With this letter of intent, we, the signing cultural organizations, express our intention to welcome, host and stage Ukrainian theatre artists in our venues, to make Ukrainian dramatic work visible to the European community.

Support of the Ukrainian Cultural Scene

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In June 2026, Sasha Waltz &amp; Guests will be performing the productions Beethoven&nbsp;7 and In&nbsp;C at the Haus der Berliner Festspiele. Sasha Waltz &amp; Guests will also be staging a special evening to celebrate the 75th&nbsp;anniversary of the Goethe-Institut.

Sasha Waltz &amp; Guests

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Tickets for ten selected concert highlights of the Musikfest Berlin, which in 2026 will also mark the 75th&nbsp;anniversary of the Berliner Festspiele, are already available. The programme includes Gy&ouml;rgy Ligeti’s grotesquely humorous anti-opera Le Grand Macabre and George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess.

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The exploration of myths and rituals shapes the fourth edition of the Performing Arts Season with works by Marina Abramović, Mario Banushi, Marie Chouinard, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker / Rosas, Ictus, Bl!ndman, Dumb Type, Damien Jalet / Kohei Nawa and Gisèle Vienne. The programme will be published on 18 June, and advance ticket sales will start.

Performing Arts Season

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The Theatertreffen’s jury of critics announced their selection of the 10 most remarkable productions for the 2026 Theatertreffen. The programme will be published on 2&nbsp;April, advance ticket sale will begin on 18 April, 10:00.