The Von der Heydt-Museum in Wuppertal has begun installing ‘Beautiful & Strict. The Power of Ornament’ (‘Schön & streng. Die Macht des Ornaments’), an exhibition examining how ornament has functioned in art from classical modernism to the present. The exhibition will be on view at the Wuppertal museum from 11 October 2026 through 14 February 2027.
The presentation will consider ornament not simply as decoration, but as a means of organizing colour, form and surface. The museum describes repetition, pattern and rapport as strategies that can connect simple and complex structures, while also carrying historical and social meanings. Artists included in the exhibition range from Henri Matisse and August Macke to Philip Taaffe, Katja Davar and Thomas Bayrle, alongside Nevin Aladağ, Azra Akzamija and Susan Hefuna.
The project is grounded in the Von der Heydt-Museum’s internationally renowned painting collection, which provides examples of how artists since the beginning of modernism have made colour, form and the picture plane subjects in their own right. The museum’s collection comprises around 2,300 paintings, 700 sculptures and 30,000 works on paper. The exhibition’s scope, however, extends beyond the institution’s modernist holdings to contemporary practices in which patterned structures can carry cultural and political associations.
According to the museum, the selection will address both the formal discipline of ornament—its regularity, seriality and systems of repetition—and its playful possibilities. The exhibition links these approaches to developments that contributed to abstract and concrete art in the first half of the 20th century and later to Op Art. It also considers the movement of forms across cultures, and the ways artists use inherited motifs to explore representation, communication and cultural identity.
The museum specifically identifies contemporary works by Aladağ, Akzamija and Hefuna as examples of practices that draw on traditional ornaments associated with particular cultural contexts. In this setting, patterns may be read not only for their visual effect but also as responses to histories of migration and the mixing of cultural forms. The presentation will also place these approaches alongside the work of Matisse, Macke, Taaffe, Davar and Bayrle, whose practices demonstrate different relationships between repetition, structure and visual pleasure.
A public programme will accompany the exhibition from its opening. Public tours are scheduled for Tuesdays at 11:30 a.m. and Sundays at 3:30 p.m.; themed tours include ‘Ornament and Cultural Identity’ on 18 November and ‘Ornament Need Not Be a “Crime”’ on 16 December. Curator-led tours with Beate Eickhoff are listed for 12 November and 10 December, while workshops and holiday courses for adults and children will be announced through the museum’s participation programme. ‘Beautiful & Strict. The Power of Ornament’ remains on view at the Von der Heydt-Museum in Wuppertal until 14 February 2027.
