Temporary Exhibitions

Temporary Exhibitions

To create new and exciting ways to interact with the many facets and layers of Max Ernst’s art and the Dadaist and Surrealist movements, we include works by artists ranging from the classic modern period to the present in our highly acclaimed exhibitions. Along with contemporaries of Max Ernst, such as Hans Arp, Man Ray, or Joan Miró, international artists of today are selected to illustrate the relevance and currency of surrealism in our time. In the first twelve years after the museum opened its doors for the first time, more than thirty solo exhibitions were on display here, honoring artists such as Neo Rauch, David Lynch, Niki de Saint Phalle, and Tim Burton. Many of these exhibitions were made possible by international collaboration. Since 2012, recipients of the Max Ernst Scholarship, which has been awarded by the City of Brühl since 1971, have also exhibited their work at the museum. Furthermore, we frequently show indepth exhibitions on Max Ernst, such as “Seine Augen trinken alles. Max Ernst und die Zeit um den Ersten Weltkrieg” (His Eyes Drink Everything. Max Ernst and the period of World War I), and host topic exhibitions such as “RealSurreal”.

One major cause for the work done at the museum is making art accessible for specific target groups. To this end, the Max Ernst Museum Brühl des LVR combines conventional and digital techniques, including recent developments in virtual and augmented reality. In 2016, the exhibition “M.C. Escher” showed the famous Dutch graphic designer’s influence on digital art and entertainment in the form of popular video games. Visitors could experience his concepts of optical illusions in three virtual reality apps through an immersive 360° environment. This was achieved in collaboration with the Cologne Game Lab, an institute at Cologne’s Technical University which also developed an augmented reality app for our 2017 exhibition “MIRÓ – World of Monsters”. The app “Miró 2.0” enabled users to fully view works of art from the catalogue. Visitors could also use it to collect three-dimensional objects from the exhibition on their smartphone and create a virtual monster. This was a unique way to understand the processes of finding and combining that were so central to Miró’s creative process.