Past exhibitions
From 27 April 2025 to 4 January 2026
Plants fascinate us and play a vital role in our lives: they produce the oxygen we breathe, nourish our bodies, and provide raw materials for our clothes and medicines. More than that, this biological diversity enriches our daily lives, awakens our senses, and gives rise to endless symbolic, philosophical and even political interpretations.
From 6 October 2024 to 6 April 2025
The Fantastic Library reveals an impressive variety of illustrated books, poetry collections, artists’ books, pop-up books and book-objects, in dialogue with paintings, lithographs and sculptures. It highlights the inspiring work of around forty artists who reinvented the book, elevating it to the status of a work of art. The exhibition route begins with works combining painting and writing, featuring figures such as Anselm Kiefer and A. R. Penck.
From 27 January to 15 September 2024
Inspired by the drawing Les Loisirs du peintre cubiste by Fernand Léger (1881-1955), created 80 years ago and recently acquired by the Würth Collection, the Musée Würth in Erstein is moving to the rhythm of the Olympic and Paralympic Games set to take place in Paris in summer 2024. From 27 January to 15 September, the exhibition Frisbee! highlights how, from the 1950s to the present day, the pleasures of sport, play and leisure have permeated consumer society. They have also nourished artistic creation, attracted by and questioning the representation of the athletic body and the capture of movement.
From 13 June 2023 to 7 January 2024
Lore Bert’s artistic work develops from precious papers originating from Japan, Nepal, Korea and China. Paper becomes her material of choice. Used in collage, as a support for painting, or materialised in sculptural form, paper is not only omnipresent but also quite literally takes over the exhibition space in her monumental installations, as demonstrated by Art and Knowledge, dedicated to Plato’s five solids.
From 13 June 2023 to 7 January 2024
Geometric abstraction is a universal language that has appeared in the form of geometric patterns in many cultures since Antiquity. In pre-Columbian Latin America, in the civilisation of ancient Egypt, and in the refinement of Islamic art, these forms can be found in many variations on ceramics, architectural surfaces and textiles. These motifs were not created solely for ornamental or aesthetic purposes, but could also take on a symbolic and magical dimension.
From 9 October 2022 to 21 May 2023
With the exhibition Art Brut. A Singular Dialogue with the Würth Collection, the Musée Würth invites its visitors to follow an unusual path: that of an art form first collected in psychiatric institutions and later discovered among self-taught creators, often living on the margins of society. Covering a broad period from the beginning of the 20th century to the present day, the exhibition brings together around fifty “Art Brut” artists, also described as non-professional creators. This highly individual artistic expression most often emerges from a context of social, emotional or economic isolation, as these artists never formed a movement or group themselves.
From 7 November 2021 to 7 September 2022
An original dialogue between works of art from the Würth Collection and specimens from the Zoological Museum of Strasbourg, bringing together an art collection and a scientific collection, a private museum and a public institution. The exhibition aims to celebrate both the beauty and the strangeness of the animal world by placing paintings by artists such as Max Ernst, Georg Baselitz, Gerhard Richter, Ray Smith, Barry Flanagan and Marc Quinn in dialogue with taxidermied animals, along a themed route structured around the four elements: air, earth, water and fire.
From 12 July 2020 to 20 October 2021
Rich in an exceptional body of works by the artist couple, the Würth Collection presents a retrospective devoted to the major projects of Christo (1935-2020) and Jeanne-Claude (1935-2009), two signatures that have shaped contemporary art and the collective imagination since the 1960s. Featuring nearly 80 drawings, photographs, models and videos, the exhibition at the Musée Würth bears witness to the work of a lifetime.
From 18 June 2019 to 15 March 2020
José de Guimarães (born in 1939) is a truly singular figure in contemporary art. For sixty years, the Portuguese artist has expressed himself through a graphic and colourful visual language. With this major retrospective, the Musée Würth retraces the creative journey of this transcultural nomad, placing part of the artist’s collection of African works in dialogue with his own works, drawn from the Würth Collection or lent by the artist.
From September 28th to May 26th 2019
Namibia. The art of a young geNerATION (Würth collection and loans) offers an introduction to the works of forty contemporary artists who live and work in Namibia. The exhibition, a presentation of 150 works, profiles a fertile and creative art scene, that of a fledgling nation deeply marked by its independence in 1990.
From January 28th to September 9th 2018
Hélène de Beauvoir (1910-2001), is the younger sister of the famous writer Simone de Beauvoir. Each in their own way, she and her sister dedicated their lives to breaking free from this order by devoting themselves entirely to creative activity – writing for Simone and painting for Hélène. In doing so, they gave themselves the vital independence required to take on the status of a female artist, and the difficulties it entailed.
From 31th January 2017 to 7th January 2018
Through 150 paintings, drawings and installations from the Würth Collection, the exhibition presents a fascinating vision of the representation of the human figure in art. The extensive selection of works, dating from the late 19th century up to the present day, encompasses major pieces from the Würth collection as well as recent acquisitions.
From 28th September 2016 to 8th January 2017
The exhibiiton presents an overview of the iconography of propaganda that flourished between the belligerents during the First World War and a selection of artists’ testimonies.
A co-production by :
Musée Würth France Erstein
The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles
Les Musées de la Ville de Strasbourg
From 20th September 2015 to 4th September 2016
The exhibition offers a wide selection of paintings and sculptures of the colombian artist.
From 7th february 2014 to 9 August 2015
The Musée Würth France Erstein hosts a retrospective memorial exhibition devoted to the greatest English sculptor of his generation, with an exceptional range of his works drawn from the past 40 years.
From 5th June 2013 to 5 January 2014
The exhibition concentrates on famous photographer (Michèle Sila, Gisèle Freund, Herbert List…) and pictures of Pablo Picasso, Piet Mondrian or Gerhard Richter they took.
From 19th September 2012 to 19th May 2013. Extension until 5th January 2014
The exhibition offers a selection of extraordinary paintings and sculptures of the collection Würth around the subject of the forest.
From 23th March to 2nd September 2012
The exhibition allows for an immersion in a world where portrait—especially feminine portrait—prevails.
From 5th October 2011 to 4th March 2012
The works by certain of the artists represented are emblematic of studio glass both from a technical and from a rhetorical point of view, or of the generation of their creators, like Václav Cigler, Stanislav Libenský and Jaroslavá Brychtová or Clifford Rainey.
From 28th January to 25th September 2011
Anselm Kiefer in the Würth Collection is an exhibition that presents an exceptionally rich selection of works by the German artist, ranging from his early creations to contemporary pieces. This is because in recent years, the acquisition choices made by Professor Reinhold Würth, the collector and founder of the Würth Group, have taken in various major groups within Anselm Kiefer’s body of work.
From 4th June 2010 to 9th Januar 2011
The idea behind the exhibition grew out of the premise that many artists have left Karlsruhe for Paris or Berlin over the past century, whilst others have settled in Karlsruhe, attracted by the prestige of its Academy of Fine Arts. As the title suggests, these two directions of movement have been a constant source of artistic renewal and helped to create a unique artistic profile in the Upper Rhine region.
From 9th October 2009 to 16th May 2010
Gao Xingjian, Prix nobel de Littérature 2000
Günter Grass, Prix nobel de Littérature 1999
The Shadow of Words is an exhibition that sets up a dialogue between two artists whose work takes in poetry, novels, painting and theatre. They are known for their literary endeavours but each of them also asserts his status as a painter. Bringing these multi-disciplinary artists together gives us the opportunity to draw two remarkable portraits of figures who have been marked by the history of the 20th century.
From 19 February 2008 to 18 September 2009
In this exhibition, the art historian Werner Spies, who is president of the Würth group’s art advisory committee, offers a selection of works from the collection’s recent acquisitions. The collector’s personal approach to art is reflected in the title of the show. Like a journey through art history, the exhibition presents diverse groupings of works, providing an overview of the artistic developments of the last 150 years through their multiplicity of styles and forms. Although it does not represent the collection as a whole, the exhibition does offer an insight into its defining features and perspectives.
From 3rd October 2008 to 1st February 2009
François Morellet – Reason and Derision – is an exhibition that has been put together in close collaboration with the artist, based on works selected from the Würth Collection and from the artist’s own studio, in addition to loans from other collections. The title in itself, with its opposition of these two terms to form an “unnatural couple”, as Morellet puts it, sums up the spirit that has guided the artist’s work for almost fifty years: the serious faculty of “Reason” in constant competition with “Derision”, his glib, frivolous and sometimes insolent side.
From January 27 to September 21, 2008
The inaugural exhibition at the Musée Würth France Erstein invites us to consider art as another world. By liberating us from our temporality, art creates a universe free from the rules and demands of reality, yet maintains a complex relationship with that reality, in which reciprocal influences abound. Escaping from rational utilitarianism, it can assert its intrinsic values and is governed by its own laws.