Internationally renowned collection
The Staatsgalerie is one of Germany's great art museums. Our collection comprises painting, sculpture and graphic art from the Middle Ages to the present, including many masterpieces and an internationally outstanding collection of modern art. Special highlights are Oskar Schlemmer's »Figurinen zum Triadischen Ballett« from the early 1920s, the famous »Rückenakte« (1909‒1930) by Henri Matisse, numerous works by Picasso,including the sculpture group »Die Badenden« (1956) and the Joseph Beuys Room, which was still personally furnished by the artist.
Museum as a school of seeing
Art is a cultural language through which people communicate with each other. In the process, the art of the present always responds to the art of previous epochs.
In our digital age, the museum has the task of being a »school of seeings« and conveying culture through the visual, the image and its narrative.
Art for the democratic society
Who owns the museum? This is a question we ask ourselves again and again. Not least with the museum presentation of the work »Love is in the bin« by the British street artist Banksy. The work triggered a global media hype in 2018 and hung in our collection for over 10 months to explore its art value.
We stand for an open discourse on art, art history and society. In our exhibitions and programmes, from lectures to events, we constantly offer new opportunities to engage with art as a seismograph of society.
We stand for an open, liberal, democratic as well as diverse society and thus for the participation of all. Our collection belongs to the citizens. We offer them a variety of digital and analogue access to art and art history. Due to its historical origins, the canon of our collection is very European and Western, with a strong male gaze. Female positions are only rudimentarily represented and contemporary works by African, Asian or Latin American artists are completely missing. We are aware of this and try to break it up in various ways. Since 2021, for example, we have been collecting more works by female artists by setting a quota.
The house offers 12,000 m² of exhibition space, divided between the Old State Gallery by architect Georg Gottlob Barth (1843) with the extension by Albert von Bok (1888), the postmodern building by James Stirling (1984) and the Steib Halls by the Basel architect couple of the same name (2002). All the buildings are interconnected.
