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Hans Peter Adamski

born 1947 in Kloster Oesede, lives in Berlin.

A light shaft running through all the floors of the Jakob Kaiser Building is the site chosen by Hans Peter Adamski for his artistic intervention. Formerly a member of the Cologne artists group “Mülheimer Freiheit”, Adamski has installed four silhouette-like twisted ribbons – in varying shades from grey to violet to black and back to grey – which run the entire length of the wall. They ascend in parallel rows from the bottom of the shaft; the colour at...

Georg Baselitz

born 1938 in Deutschbaselitz/Saxony, lives in Derneburg/Lower Saxony and Imperia/Italy.

In two large canvases located in the south entrance hall, Georg Baselitz takes up motifs from works by the Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840). As has been his practice since the late 1960s, here too he places the motifs on their heads in order to give priority to the formal struc­ture of the compositions.

His “Friedrich’s Woman on the Abyss” and “Friedrich’s Melancholy” are based on woodcuts of ...

Joseph Beuys

Born in the city of Krefeld in 1921, died in Düsseldorf in 1986.

Beuys is generally recognised as one of the most important artists of our age. His outstanding significance lies in the fact that he propagated a synthesis of life and art and, with the courageous tenacity of an outsider, succeeded in attaining that ideal in his career. Beuys’s training and practice as a sculptor prepared him for the development of ‘social sculpture’. This concept necessarily entailed the artist involving himself in...

Christian Boltanski

Archive of German Members of Parliament

The main theme of French artist Christian Boltanski’s work is the question of how we perceive the past. His installation Archive of German Members of Parliament, created for the basement on the east side of the Reichstag Building, is related intimately to the building’s past and present. Some 5,000 metal boxes bear the names of all the democratically elected Members of Germany’s parliaments from 1919: the National Assembly (the constitutional convention of ...

Grisha Bruskin

born 1945 in Moscow, lives in New York.

In his triptych “Life Above All”, located in the parliamentary club room of the Reichstag Building, Russian artist Grisha Bruskin ironically comments on ideological myths, in particular those promulgated by the ‘sculpture mania’ that prevailed in the Soviet Union and attempted to use art for the purposes of indoctrination. Arranged like a wall of icons in a Russian Orthodox church, 115 individual pictures hang above – monochrome white outlines identifiable ...

Angela Bulloch

born 1966 in Ontario/Canada, lives in Berlin and London.

British artist Angela Bulloch creates a subtle link between Members of the Bun­destag and visitors in a cleverly suggestive installation: when someone sits down on one of the coloured benches in the foyer outside the conference room of the European Committee, electrical contacts cause a matching coloured light to be illuminated in the foyer of the visitors’ restaurant on the floor below. Those who are sitting on the benches in the “Seats of ...

Sophie Calle

Deutsch  English  Français

Die Entfernung - The Detachment

"To record this process, I visited places from which symbols of GDR history have been effaced. I asked passers-by and residents to describe the objects that once filled these empty spaces. I photographed their absence and replaced the missing monuments with their memories." (Sophie Calle)

Succinctly and precisely, the artist describes the concept behind her installation "Die Entfernung - The Detachment", in which she graphically demonstrates ...

Christo

Born in the town of Gabrovo, Bulgaria, in 1935, died 2020 in New York City

A study made by Christo in 1986 in connection with his Wrapped Reichstag project is displayed in the rooftop restaurant of the Reichstag Building. Christo and Jeanne-Claude had to fight for almost two decades before this design sketch could be made a reality with the wrapping of the Reichstag Building. Looking at the study with its muted colouring, one recalls that Christo and his wife, Jeanne-Claude, spent more than two d...

Carlfriedrich Claus

born in the town of Annaberg in 1930, died in Chemnitz in 1998.

Claus was forced into ‘inner emigration’ in the former GDR. Just before his death, he was able to oversee the installation of his work Aurora Experimental Space in front of the Members’ lobby at the same height as the visitors’ level. Claus evolved a form of art in which he noted thoughts derived from the cabbala, other forms of mysticism and Marxist philosophy on both sides of pieces of parchment and sheets of glass. The writing con...

Lutz Dammbeck

born 1948 in Leipzig, lives in Hamburg and Dresden.

In his work “Heracles Notes” placed in the lobby of the parliamentary groups of the Reichstag Building, Leipzig artist Lutz Dammbeck has created a complex, multifaceted work made up of collages and superimposed drawings. The main theme of his oeuvre is the perpetual conflict between the conditioning and disciplining of the individual by society on the one hand, and the courage required to resist such conditioning and preserve one’s individuality...

Hanne Darboven

Born in Munich in 1941, died 2009 in Hamburg-Rönneburg

In her 12 Months, Work for Europe, installed in the lobby and press room of the CDU/CSU parliamentary group, Darboven commemorates 1997 as a ‘European year’ that represented a crucial stage in the development of the European Union. The days of the year are commemorated by sheets of paper arranged on twelve panels. Every day, the artist noted the date in numerical form on each framed sheet in an identical way. Hence, although the personal, han...

Tacita Dean

The Daughter of the Regiment

Tacita Dean works in a large number of techniques in media ranging from painting to photography and film, frequently combining more than one of them. She addresses issues relating to the passage of time, exploring what we remember and how we remember it. Often her art revolves around decay and loss as triggers of memories.

That is the approach adopted in the installation „Die Regimentstochter“ (The Daughter of the Regiment), on display in the Jakob Kaiser Building. It ...

Lili Fischer

born 1947 in Priwall/Travemünde, lives in Hamburg.

Lili Fischer has organised a “Grazienkon­gress” (Meeting of the Graces) on the wall of a light shaft in the Jakob Kaiser Building that extends through seven floors. Silhou­ettes of nymphs and other ethereal crea­tures, which the artist has cut out of fleece and coloured with graphite, seem to be floating, somersaulting, dancing or simply gliding gracefully up the wall.

Some of the silhouettes resemble figures from wellknown paintings, such as Sandro ...

Wieland Förster

Deutsch  English

It is rather unusual to see the bust of a non-politician being given a place of honour in a parliamentary building. Such an honour has been accorded the Jewish physician Dr. Benno Hallauer (1880-1943), who owned one of the biggest private clinics in Berlin, the gynaecological clinic located at Schiffbauerdamm 31 / 32 on the Spree opposite the Reichstag Building. In the twenties and thirties, his clinic built up a wide reputation in the field of gynaecology before the National-Soci...

Norman Foster

born 1935 in Manchester, lives in London.

In the role of artist and architect, Norman Foster represents Great Britain in the art concept for the Reichstag Building, as invitations were extended not only to German artists but also to artists from the four former Allied Powers. As the architect he was responsible for the re-construction of the Reichstag Building and the construction of the new dome.

He also planed the reserve of the eagle exhibited in the plenary chamber. The obverse is based on the...

Otto Freundlich

Born in the town of Stolp, Pomerania, in 1878 and was killed at Majdanek concentration camp near Lublin, Poland, in 1943.

Freundlich originally intended his Architectural Sculpture of 1934-35 to be enlarged to a height of 20 or 30 metres. Although consisting of abstract geometrical elements, the piece hints at actual objects, including a column, a helmet, a torso and an archaic throne. A number of forms, some rounded, some angular, appear in front of a large tapering column. The firm, compact sha...

Rupprecht Geiger

Born in Munich in 1908, died 2009 in Munich

In producing a work for one of the protocol rooms, Geiger was faced with the same problem as Georg Karl Pfahler in the chamber of the Council of Elders: twothirds of the walls in both rooms are covered with bright blue panelling. Pfahler chose to let his coloured objects encroach on the panels. Geiger, on the other hand, pushed the blue of the panelling into the background with the vitality of his brilliant orange-and-red frieze painted above it.

Geiger ...

Antony Gormley

born 1950 in London, lives in London.

British artist Antony Gormley has flooded the inner courtyard of House 6 of the Jakob Kaiser Building with water, so that now only a raised walkway leads from the building diagonally into the courtyard. Like a dark mirror, the surface of the water catches the light from the sky above. Castiron sculptures of human figures project out at right angles to the side walls, facing skywards as if they are about to run up the walls. The sculptures are also reflected i...

Gotthard Graubner

born 1930 in Erlbach/Vogtland/Saxony, died 2013 in Düsseldorf

In selecting works for the second floor of the Reichstag Building, it was decided to focus on artists who employ colour as an independent medium of expression, for the spatial impact of the protocol and con­ference rooms located in that part of the building is dominated by Norman Foster’s wooden panelling and its colour concept by the Danish designer Per Arnoldi.

In his cushion painting “ ... rose-fingered Eos awakes ... ” Gotthard Graub...

Hans Haacke

born 1936 in Cologne, lives in New York.

An area of the north courtyard of the Reichstag Building, marked off by thick wooden planks, displays in neon lettering the dedication “DER BEVÖLKERUNG” (to the population) – a pendant to the bronze inscription “DEM DEUTSCHEN VOLKE” (to the German people) that was affixed to the west portal of the Reichstag Building in 1916.

Hans Haacke invited Members of the Bundestag to fill in the spaces around the lettering with earth from their constituencies – the het...

Bernhard Heisig

Born in Wroclaw (Breslau) in 1925, died 2011 in Strodehne, Brandenburg

Heisig, a leading representative of the Leipzig School of painting in the GDR, unfolds a disquieting panorama of German history in Time and Life, a painting rooted in the Expressionist tradition that can be seen in the cafeteria on the first floor of the Reichstag Building.

The motifs, almost bewildering in their abundance, include references to Frederick the Great, the opportunism of fellow travellers who claim only to be doin...

Jörg Herold

Lichtschleife mit Datumsgrenze

Jörg Herold's installation "Lichtschleife mit Datumsgrenze" (Light Loop with the Date Line) is located in the outer courtyard of the Paul Löbe Building, a new parliament building north of the Reichstag. The majority of parliamentary work takes place in this new building, which was designed by the Munich architect Stephan Braunfels. The conference rooms for the German Bundestag's parliamentary committees and offices for the committee chairpersons and their staffs are...

Franka Hörnschemeyer

BFD - bündig fluchtend dicht

Franka Hörnschemeyer (born 1958), "BFD - bündig fluchtend dicht" (flush aligned impervious), 1998 / 2001

Franka Hörnschemeyer has created a spatial sculpture composed of lattice walls for one of the courtyards on the northern side of the Paul Löbe Building. The red and black painted iron lattices are telescoped together to create an elaborate, filigree spatial labyrinth that takes up and reformulates the idea of a hedge maze in a garden setting. Five door-sized opening...

Jenny Holzer

born 1950 in Gallipolis/Ohio, lives in New York.

On a pillar in the north entrance hall of the Reichstag Building, American artist Jenny Holzer presents speeches given by Members of the Reichstag and Bundestag between 1871 and 1999. The speeches, which were selected and grouped by the artist according to subject, flow up the pillar in the form of LED lettering from floor to ceiling. Standing in the centre of the entrance hall, the pillar appears to be an integral part of the building’s structure....

Dani Karavan

Basic Law 49 (Grundgesetz 49)

Born 1930 in Tel Aviv, died there 2021

The distinctive appearance of the Jakob Kaiser Building on the side facing the River Spree has been shaped by the creative design concept of Israeli artist Dani Karavan. In one of the courtyards that borders on the riverside promenade he has linked the two areas by placing an apparent boundary between them, however this ‘boundary fence’ is made of metre-high panels of glass rather than railings or balustrades. Beneath these glass...

Ellsworth Kelly

"Berlin Panels 2000", west facade of the Paul Löbe Building

Ellsworth Kelly is one of the best-known artists associated with ‘hard-edge painting’. In 2013, he was awarded the National Medal of Arts by President Barack Obama. This level of appreciation is reflected, too, in the fact that he was asked in 2008 to create a 12-metre-high stainless steel column for the central courtyard of the US Embassy in Berlin – the Berlin Totem. Ellsworth Kelly also created a prominent installation for the German ...

Anselm Kiefer

born in the town of Donaueschingen in 1945, lives and works in Barjac, France.

In Only with wind with time and with sound, a largeformat painting in one of the reception rooms in the Reichstag Building, Kiefer addresses the historical roots of humanity. The picture looks like some archaeological site. In the centre is a huge tower of mud bricks, reminiscent of a Mesopotamian ziggurat. The tower has disintegrated at the sides, where it is barely distinguishable from the ground around it. The monoc...

Imi (Klaus Wolf) Knoebel

born 1940 in Dessau, lives in Düsseldorf.

With its reduction to basic geometric forms, the four-part installation “Rot Gelb Weiß Blau 1–4” (Red Yellow White Blue 1–4), which has been devised by former Beuys student, sculptor and painter Imi Knoebel for the reception hall of the Marie-Elisabeth Lüders Building, relates directly to Stephan Braunfels’s architectural con­cept.

Knoebel’s coloured wall objects explore the relationship between space and colour, joining white and primary-coloured strips an...

Jens Liebchen

Born in 1970 in Bonn, lives and works in Berlin.

In its efforts to acquire appropriate artworks to display in the Reichstag Building and the adjoining parliamentary buildings, the German Bundestag has invited many German and international artists to submit designs or competition entries. From the outset, Jens Liebchen has observed this process with his camera. This has created an autonomous body of photographic work, which functions at a second level parallel to the various art projectsrooted in ...

Markus Lüpertz

born 1941 in Liberec/Bohemia, lives in Berlin and Düsseldorf

The painter has mounted his canvas “1840” flush with the end wall of the res­taurant for Members of the Bundestag. His work employs motifs from the English painter William Turner’s (1775–1851) Rhine journey in 1840, into which he has woven allusions to the founding of the German nation state, light-heartedly linking the Spree and the Rhine rivers.

The artist has also incorporated motifs and sketches from earlier works in the painting, lay...

Julia Mangold

born 1966 in Munich, lives in Munich.

Using simple, elementary shapes, the Munich artist has formed a connection between the interior and exterior of the Marie-Elisabeth Lüders Building. Inside the hall she has added the basic geometric shape of a large black rectangle which, as a raised form proportional to the architec­ture, follows the curve of the outer wall of the library rotunda.

The same black rectangle can also be seen on the outside of the building – here featured as a recess in the façade...

Wolfgang Mattheuer

Born in Reichenbach in the Vogtland in 1927, and died in Leipzig in 2004.

Along with Bernhard Heisig and Werner Tübke, Mattheuer was one of the leading representatives of the Leipzig School of painting in the former GDR. His style combines elements derived from the New Objectivity of the 1920s and early 1930s with surreal imagery that could be read as a critical commentary on political reality in the GDR. The oblique subtlety of this imagery avoided provocation, enabling Mattheuer to criticise th...

Christiane Möbus

born 1947 in Celle, lives in Hanover and Berlin.

Visitors to House 1 of the Jakob Kaiser Building first of all enter a spacious hall. From the ceiling of the hall Christiane Möbus has suspended four rowing boats – racing eights painted yellow, red, black and blue – which slowly ascend and descend through the space. As each boat follows its own rhythm and speed, the constellation of boats changes constantly. This work can be seen as an allusion to the many rivers and lakes in Berlin, in particular...

François Morellet

born 1926 in Cholet/France, died 2016 in Cholet/France

Against the strict geometric rhythm of the interior hall’s architectural design, French artist François Morellet has set a rhythmical installation of neon tubes: starting with a tightly drawn band of bright red neon, curved yellow, green and blue neon strips hang from the ceiling like festive garlands; they lead through the hall and respond – like Ellsworth Kelly’s aluminium panels on the west façade – to the clear structure of the hall with ...

Maurizio Nannucci

born 1939 in Florence, lives in Florence.

The illuminated blue letters of the neon installation “Blauer Ring” (Blue Circle) by Italian artist Maurizio Nannucci can be seen from outside the building through the glass façade of the library rotunda.

Installed directly beneath the ceiling of the library’s reading room, the blue neon band of text runs in a circle eighty metres long. Inspired by a text by Hannah Arendt, Nannucci runs two sentences together to highlight the state of tension between the n...

Jorge Pardo

untitled restaurant

Jorge Pardo (born 1963 in Havana, Cuba; lives in Los Angeles, USA), Restaurant in the Paul-Löbe Building, Berlin, 1998/2002

Looking from the Kronprinzenbrücke across the River Spree to the Reichstag Building at night, one is struck by coloured lights coming from the Paul-Löbe-Building. Emitted by spherical lamps designed by the Cuban artist Jorge Pardo, the lights twinkle like bubbles on the surface of the Spree at the point where it flows between the Paul-Löbe Building and the...

Sigmar Polke

born 1941 in Oels/Silesia, died 2010 in Cologne

Visitors entering the building through the west entrance hall encounter works by Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter. Both artists were faced with the difficult task of creating works able to assert themselves against the 30-metre-high walls of the hall.

In both form and content a stark contrast to Richter’s work on the opposite wall, Sigmar Polke’s installation consists of five lightboxes displaying playfully ironic images from politics and history. Wh...

Neo Rauch

born 1960 in Leipzig, lives in Leipzig.

The eastern façade of the Paul Löbe Building is strikingly accentuated by the presence of two radiant green neon figures by Leipzig artist Neo Rauch. Each of the 10-metre-high sculptures shows the figure of a man standing on a ladder, although their poses differ slightly.

As familiar and realistic as they may at first appear, the question as to what they are doing is all the more puzzling: one seems to be reaching out to pluck fruit from a tree like a garden...

Tobias Rehberger

born 1966 in Esslingen, lives in Frankfurt am Main.

For the visitors’ restaurant Tobias Rehberger has forged a link between different cultures. He drew classic pieces of Modernist designer furniture from memory, and on the basis of these draw­ings had chairs and tables reproduced by craftsmen from other cultures, for example Egypt and Mexico. This process of double refraction, on the one hand by Rehberger’s present day artistic recollection of classic items, and on the other by the specific percep...

Hans Peter Reuter

born 1942 in Schwenningen am Neckar, lives in Karlsruhe and Lauf/Pregnitz.

Using his trademark method of playing with geometric forms, Nuremberg artist Hans Peter Reuter has created a design in intensely luminescent blue for the ‘Kaisersaal’ of the former Reichstag Presi­dential Palace. The Kaisersaal is now used as a reception and banqueting hall; when it was renovated, three-metre-high panels of walnut wood were fitted to the walls, which the artist contrasts with over seven thousand different-s...

Gerhard Richter

Emil Schumacher

born 1912 in Hagen, died 1999 in San José/Ibiza.

Emil Schumacher was faced with the challenge of creating a work able to assert itself against the dominating presence of Norman Foster’s wall panelling located in the conference hall, a challenge he met with “Stations and Times, I–IV” – one of the last works he completed before his death.

Painted in an expressionistic, strongly gestural style on aluminium sheeting, the work’s translucence and cool elegance nevertheless appear to curb its furious ene...

Katharina Sieverding

born 1944 in Prague, lives in Düsseldorf and Berlin.

In the delegate lobby Sieverding installed a memorial for Members of the Reichstag in the Weimar Republic who became vic­tims of persecution and was created by the Düsseldorf artist yet in 1992. The five- part photo-painting with its background motif of a blazing solar corona recalls not only the Reichstag fire and the global conflagration unleashed by the National Socialists but also the rebirth of a purified democratic Germany, rising like a p...

Walter Stöhrer

Born in Stuttgart in 1937, and died in Berlin in 2000.

Stöhrer was a pupil of H.A.P. Griesbacher in Stuttgart before moving in 1959 to Berlin, where he developed an individual style, which he called ‘intra-psychic realism’. This involves colour applied with dynamic gestures of the brush over written characters and calligraphic signs.

Stöhrer began the example in the Reichstag Building by taking an impression from a plate prepared for dry point engraving. To this blue-grey ground he added black wri...

Strawalde

Jürgen Böttcher, alias Strawalde, was born in the town of Frankenberg in 1931, and lives and works in Berlin.

Böttcher, who calls himself Strawalde after Strahwalde in Upper Lusatia, where he spent much of his childhood and youth, was one of the leading oppositional painters in the GDR. In Dresden, he gathered round him a circle of like-minded spirits, including the painters Ralf Winkler, Peter Herrmann and Peter Graf, who were prevented from exhibiting and harassed in other ways by the GDR autho...

Günther Uecker

born 1930 in Wendorf/Mecklenburg, lives in Düsseldorf and Berlin.

Inspired by theological tradition and with great artistic and architectonic economy, Günther Uecker has succeeded in creating a room of silence for the Reichstag Building which invites people to engage in reflection and meditation.

Through a fissure in a dividing wall in front of the side windows, Uecker allows daylight to filter indirectly into the room, which thus, in contrast to Norman Foster’s light-flooded architecture, assumes...