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Profile of the Nationalgalerie

The Nationalgalerie (National Gallery) comprises six museum buildings that together house a cosmos of art spanning from before the year 1800 all the way to recent works fresh from the studio.

The original home of the collection, the Alte Nationalgalerie, is located on the Museumsinsel Berlin (Museum Island Berlin).

Its exhibitions cover art from the nineteenth through the early twentieth centuries. The Neue Nationalgalerie at the Kulturforum, near Potsdamer Platz, represents a temporal continuation of this department. Art from the decades since the 1960s, meanwhile, is presented at the Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart, situated close to the Central Station (Hauptbahnhof).

These three museums and the key works shown in them represent major art movements from the past two centuries, the continuities within them, and their radical points of disjuncture. Together they afford visitors a comprehensive survey of the shifting developments and emerging trends in art, first from a purely European perspective and later from a global one. Moreover, they are joined by further museums that, though smaller in scale, are nonetheless unique in character and each dedicated to a specific theme within the Nationalgaleries overall collection. To the west, the two buildings designed by German architect Friedrich August Stüler opposite Schloss Charlottenburg (Charlottenburg Palace) now house remarkable suites of works amassed by private collectors: the Museum Berggruen with European modernist works, and the Sammlung Scharf-Gerstenberg, with art of the fantastic, spanning many epochs and culminating in Surrealism.

Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s Friedrichswerdersche Kirche re-opened in autumn 2020 after many years of restoration and refurbishment work. As an affiliate department of the Alte Nationalgalerie, it is dedicated to the display of one of Germany’s most important and extensive collections of nineteenth-century sculpture in a church built during the same period.