About
Schinkel Pavillon occupies an octagonal glass pavilion in the garden of the Kronprinzenpalais, the Crown Prince's Palace, just off Unter den Linden, and carries a history as layered and distinctive as its architecture. The pavilion itself was built in 1969 by Richard Paulick, an architect perhaps best known for his work on Karl Marx Allee, and was designed to incorporate remnants of the surrounding historic ensemble, including the ruins of Karl Friedrich Schinkel's Bauakademie, whose name the institution carries today. Its floor to ceiling windows open onto a panoramic view of Berlin's historic centre, taking in Museum Island and the Friedrichswerder Church, a setting that ties the building inseparably to the surrounding cityscape and its layered political history, from its use for state functions in the postwar decades to its present role in the city's contemporary art life.
The site carries a further institutional lineage that the Schinkel Pavillon consciously continues. In 1918, Ludwig Justi founded a new department of the Berlin National Gallery within the Kronprinzenpalais dedicated to contemporary art, drawing on works gathered directly from Berlin's studios, an initiative widely regarded as the world's first dedicated contemporary art institution. This history of the site as a place for showing the art of its own moment resonates through the Schinkel Pavillon's programme today.
The Schinkel Pavillon as it exists now was founded in 2007 by artist Nina Pohl, who has led the institution as an art association, or Kunstverein, ever since, opening with Sylvie Fleury's exhibition Hypnotic Poison in the summer of that year. Since its founding, the Schinkel Pavillon has served as a platform for experimental sculpture, installation and media art, with its exhibitions frequently engaging directly with the peculiarity of the pavilion's architecture and its unusual relationship to the city visible through its windows. The institution marked its fifteenth anniversary in 2022 with solo exhibitions by Anna Uddenberg and Jon Rafman, a milestone that reflected on how the surrounding urban landscape, including the shifting patterns of Berlin's real estate development, has itself become part of the material the institution's artists engage with.
Curatorially, the Schinkel Pavillon has built a reputation for cross generational group exhibitions and ambitious solo presentations that bring together contemporary practice with historical reference points, exemplified by group shows exploring themes such as ecological transformation through the work of artists spanning the nineteenth century to the present. As a Kunstverein, the institution's core organisational pillars rest on its exhibition programme, its association based membership structure, and its close identification with its singular architectural setting. Funded through a combination of membership contributions, private support and public project funding typical of Berlin's Kunstverein model, the Schinkel Pavillon continues to offer an intimate yet internationally attentive space for contemporary art in the heart of the city.