The Sculpture Hall – an impressive room, 70 metres long. With its vaulted ceiling resting on powerful columns and stretching elegantly over the sandstone slab floor, the room’s architecture tells of the building’s first life as an arsenal. In this space today, you can explore the history of sculpture from the second half of the nineteenth century to the present. The journey begins with French sculptor Auguste Rodin, the renowned founder of modern sculpture, and his contemporaries. Thanks to the museum’s first director, Georg Treu, our museum boasts a remarkable collection in this area. As far as their funds and the circumstances would allow, his successors continued the tradition of acquiring works by important contemporary sculptors.
Rodin’s influence is also evident in the circle of German sculptors around Wilhelm Lehmbruck and Karl Albiker. In the early twentieth century, they sought to convey human feelings and emotions in their works – an approach which became known as “expressionist sculpture”. The works by German sculptors from the post-war years to 1989 reflect the history of a divided country. Here, you can also find East German artists pursuing ideas away from the state prescribed canon of art, although some of these works only entered the collection after 1989. In the post-war Western Bloc, developments in sculpture were informed by a critical dialogue with abstraction, also evident here in works by British and American sculptors. When our museum re-opened in 2010, some contemporary sculptures were also acquired which illustrate how far our understanding of sculpture and the sculptures themselves have changed over the last decades. In comparison to earlier times, these works employ a far broader spectrum of materials and forms.
