Image: Arp Museum Bahnhof Rolandseck, Remagen
The Arp Museum Bahnhof Rolandseck in Remagen has opened ‘Zu den Sternen! Weltraum und Weltflucht seit der Moderne’, a large exhibition tracing how the idea of outer space has functioned as a site of longing, utopia and projection from modernism to the present. Running from 10 July 2026 to 10 January 2027, the show brings together around 100 works and connects apocalyptic awakening, boundary loss and cosmic imagination across more than a century of art.
According to the museum, the exhibition presents space not simply as a scientific or technological theme but as a powerful mental image through which artists have reflected on their own time. The project is framed around the idea that looking to the cosmos can expose “cosmic dreams” while also turning back toward questions of the present and future. The museum’s materials describe the exhibition as a response to global crises as well as to older modern visions of alternative existence beyond the earth.
The checklist spans modern and contemporary positions, with named artists including Yael Bartana, Max Ernst, El Lissitzky, Katharina Sieverding, Sophie Taeuber-Arp and Emma Talbot. The exhibition page also lists additional artists from the wider presentation, among them Hans (Jean) Arp, Hannah Höch, Joan Miró, Man Ray, Alexander Rodtschenko, Oskar Schlemmer, Yves Tanguy and others, placing the show within a long line of avant-garde and postwar approaches to cosmology, abstraction and the imaginary.
The museum’s interpretation situates the early 20th century as a moment when fears and fantasies around the cosmos intensified. Its text points to the Halley’s Comet panic and to the ways technological change and rationalization helped multiply projections of earthly concerns into space. It also notes that astronomical knowledge expanded and that the idea of traveling in space became thinkable in theory. From the 1980s onward, the museum says, critical voices grew louder as enthusiasm for space travel met increasing cultural pessimism and concern about finite resources.
Several works highlighted in the museum’s online presentation suggest the range of media on view. These include film, photography, collage, sculpture, drawing and reconstruction, such as John Wood and Paul Harrison’s ‘Bored Astronauts on the Moon’, Emma Talbot’s ‘Generative Plants’ and ‘Spaceship Earth’, Katharina Sieverding’s ‘DIE SONNE UM MITTERNACHT SCHAUEN (RED)’, Yael Bartana’s ‘Farewell’, and Alexander Rodtschenko’s ‘Hanging Spatial Construction No. 9, Circle in Circle’. The museum also shows historical and reconstructed pieces by artists such as Lavinia Schulz and Walter Holdt, underscoring the exhibition’s cross-generational reach.
The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue titled ‘Zu den Sternen! Weltraum und Weltflucht seit der Moderne’, with contributions by Dr. Julia Wallner, Shelley Harten, Claudia Liebrand, Brygida Ochaim, Torsten Blume, Astrid von Asten and Sylvie Kyeck. The museum also lists a related SWR Kultur broadcast from 12 July 2026 and a programme of guided tours, workshops and events running alongside the show through the autumn and winter, including a summer holiday workshop and a dialogic tour on 14 August 2026 led by Prof. Dr. Björn Hayer and Dr. Julia Wallner.
