Since 1874, the oldest and one of the most important collections of Messel fossils, which were recovered from oil shale that was around 48 million years old, have been on display in the museum. The Messel Collection is one of the figureheads of the Hessian State Museum in Darmstadt and a special cultural asset of the State of Hesse. In addition, the fossil deposit Grube Messel near Darmstadt was included in the UNESCO World Heritage List as the first German natural monument in 1995, because it allows a unique insight into the early evolution of mammals. This award from the Messel pit will mark its 25th anniversary in 2020.

The rules in the museum are different from those in everyday life. While objects of daily use are repaired, reused or maintained, the museum tries to change them as little as possible. The traces of time should be preserved, as they are important contemporary witnesses in the way society deals with its history.

The MUSEUM Jagdschloss Kranichstein searches for traces and makes the story behind the repairs and restorations of paintings, textiles, weapons and furniture visible.

Seven tenths of the earth's surface is covered with water and a look at the sky strengthens the power of the symbolic colour blue for infinity. The painter Takeshi Makishima, who grew up in the Japanese metropolis of Fukuoka by the sea in 1980 and graduated from the Düsseldorf Art Academy, thinks in terms of space and time.

At the invitation of the director of the Kunsthalle Darmstadt, he is exhibiting a series of six new canvas paintings specially created for the foyer of the house, which make everything appear small and large at the same time.

Saraceno's solo exhibition "Tomás Saraceno: Songs for the Air" enables, through the use of modern technologies, new connections between people and the (environment) world as well as new forms of participation that sharpen our awareness of togetherness and social change. The exhibition thus pursues the most important concern of the artist: to create exhibitions that are neither time- nor place-specific and that point far beyond the boundaries of the museum.

Sculpture garden at the Spanish Tower in Park Rosenhöhe

The Darmstadt sculptor Wilhelm Loth, who died in 1993, would have turned 100 on September 24, 2020. The artist, best known for his characteristic female torsos, is still present in the cultural life of his hometown today, for example as the initiator of the Darmstadt Art Prize, which he himself received in 1955. The award, which has been named after him since 1995, is given regularly by the City of Darmstadt to renowned national and international artists. The BS Kulturstiftung has supported the award ceremony since it was founded and Wilhelm Loth has a special bond with it. In order to underline this bond, the foundation is commemorating the artist with a retrospective on the occasion of the opening of its new sculpture garden at the Spanish Tower on Darmstadt's Rosenhöhe.

The 20 or so sculptures from all of Wilhelm Loth's creative phases come mainly from the estate that is administered by his nephew Alexander Heil (Karlsruhe). As the artist's first open-air exhibition, the exhibition promises an exciting dialogue between the designed human form and the surrounding landscape on the edge of the Rosenhöhe natural monument.

Autumn exhibition 2020: Under the title "STAGING IDENTITY" the Institute Mathildenhöhe Darmstadt illuminates questions about identity against the background of artistic role play in photography and film.

From October 24, 2020 to February 28, 2021, the Mathildenhöhe Institute in Darmstadt is showing an exhibition in which photography and film are used as a stage for the artistic questioning of identities. When dealing with the themes of identity, its construction, transformation and fiction, the camera is used as a mirror for the staging of the self - or of the other.

The exhibition presents the innovative work of the Darmstadt artists' colony between 1904 and 1914. Following on from the first part of the collection presentation "RAUMKUNST - Made in Darmstadt 1901", the second part also refers to the idea of the artists' colony members, with each individual project draft trying to penetrating art and everyday life. Individual objects should not only be aesthetically designed, but should also merge into a total work of art in interaction - as part of completely designed room arrangements.

Genaro Strobel (*1984, Frankfurt am Main), until autumn 2020 holder of the Charlotte Prince scholarshi of the City of Darmstadt, relies on one of the oldest printing techniques with the woodcut and also transforms it into the 21st century by integrating precise laser technology. He has been producing woodcuts since 2010, using a printing technique he developed himself, which he further refined during his residency scholarship in Darmstadt. Instead of expressively connoted manual work, there is the precise cutting of machines that, with humanly impossible impossibility, produce printing blocks based on templates created on the computer. The process opens the woodcut not only for image sources such as drawing, collage and photography, but also for large formats.

On the occasion of the 100th birthday of Joseph Beuys on May 12, 2021, the exhibition »Joseph Beuys. Ulysses« for the first time shows all six booklets by Joseph »Beuys extends the Ulysses by six further chapters on behalf of James Joyce«, as a complete work. Thanks to digitisation and new presentation methods, the exhibition makes it possible for the first time to visualise all 355 drawings of the six booklets. Beuys' immense potential of his artistic ideas and energies, which was previously closed and hidden between the six black notebooks, is now finally open to the viewer and made accessible.

Hardly any other artist of his time is as omnipresent in German museums and exhibition halls as Max Liebermann. His role as a pioneer of modernism and the most important representative of German impressionism has often been described. Liebermann was a well-connected painter.

The Hessisches Landesmuseum Darmstadt presents a comprehensive exhibition with outstanding loans from private collections, some of which have never been shown to the public.

The Darmstadt mammoth is American, a mastodon, and a sensation in paleontology history: in 1801, it was the first museum-assembled skeleton of an extinct large animal in the US and so significant that american president Thomas Jefferson considered the site a national affair and Alexander von Humboldt visited it during his trip to the United States. Around 1850, the skeleton came via a number of detours to Darmstadt. For more than one hundred and fifty years it has been a Darmstädter or, as one says here, a true Heiner. The exhibition "American Heiner" traces the history of this world-famous fossil elephant skeleton, which, according to its discoverer, is also called "Peale's Mastodon".