Image: Museum Island Hombroich, Neuss
Museum Insel Hombroich has marked the reopening of the newly renovated Zwölf-Räume-Haus, returning one of its signature architectural works to public view after an extensive restoration. The Stiftung Insel Hombroich said the Erwin Heerich-designed exhibition pavilion was celebrated on June 21 and is now initially being experienced in its original, empty state as a walkable sculpture, underscoring the site’s longstanding commitment to the meeting point between art, architecture and landscape.
The reopening is significant not only as a conservation milestone but also because it restores a key example of Heerich’s approach to exhibition architecture: a building that functions as an artwork in itself rather than a neutral container for displays. That distinction sits at the heart of Hombroich, where the institution has long treated buildings, gardens and paths as part of a larger artistic environment. The restored pavilion will remain open in this stripped-back condition before further programming begins to activate it through temporary artistic interventions.
Those interventions run from July through September 2026. The first is a performance by Gustavo Gomes on July 5 at 2 p.m., opening a sequence of projects that will bring different forms of artistic presence into the pavilion. The institution’s newsletter presents the interventions as part of a broader summer programme that combines exhibitions, performances, guided visits and site-specific events across the Hombroich grounds and its Raketenstation.
The Zwölf-Räume-Haus reopening is embedded in an especially active season for the foundation. On July 4, the Siza Pavilion on the Raketenstation opens the exhibition Was für Blumen, a project initiated by Michael Growe that presents ten women artists and their individual perspectives on plants and nature. Also on July 4, Frieda Hünsch’s installation Im Keller ist es so hoch wie tief opens in the Wachhaus exhibition series, developed in cooperation with the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. The same day, the museum’s garden labyrinth is scheduled to be freely accessible on selected Sundays in July and August, reflecting Hombroich’s ongoing use of landscape as a participatory setting.
Later in the summer, the museum will host the first Hombroich: Wandelkonzert on July 19, when students from the Robert Schumann Hochschule Düsseldorf and the Hochschule für Musik und Tanz Köln will stage musical, performative and dance-based interventions at multiple locations across the site. The event is included in museum admission. The programme also includes public tours of the Rosa Haus, a nature walk through the landscape park, and a presentation by artist Ute Langanky on the Thomas Kling Archive and current research on the poet’s work.
The broader context is equally notable. Hombroich continues to operate as a linked constellation of institutions, with nearby sites including the Langen Foundation, the Skulpturenhalle Neuss and the Feldhaus – Museum für Moderne Druckgrafik all announcing concurrent exhibitions. That density of activity makes the Zwölf-Räume-Haus reopening more than a single-building event: it reasserts Hombroich’s role as a regional cultural landscape where architecture, contemporary practice and scholarship are designed to circulate together.
For the wider art world, the reopening matters because it reaffirms a model of exhibition-making that privileges spatial experience and artistic intervention over conventional display. By restoring Heerich’s pavilion and allowing it to operate first as an empty sculpture and then as a site for temporary works, Museum Insel Hombroich is extending a project that remains distinctive in European museum culture: a living environment in which architecture is not background but active artistic form.
