Berlin Modern museum opening pushed back to 2030

Fans of modern art may be looking forward to seeing works by Andy Warhol, Joseph Beuys, Anselm Kiefer and many other major artists at a new Berlin museum will unfortunately have to wait a few years longer.

The opening of the new exhibition space in the German capital, the Berlin Modern, has been delayed to 2030 after water damage and microbial infestation were found in parts of the building.

The new museum is being built near Berlin's central Potsdamer Platz and is designed to house part of the art collection of the nearby Neue Nationalgalerie.

With only a portion of its collection on display due to space constraints, the aim is to give the Neue Nationalgalerie a permanent home for its collections.

These span all major art movements in Europe and North America during the 20th century, with key works from Expressionism, Conceptual Art and Land Art, plus large-scale, multimedia installations.

The new museum will also have a special focus on art produced in Germany, such as artistic movements like Neue Sachlichkeit, Zero, and on art in the former East Germany.

Neue Sachlichkeit was a German modern realist movement of the 1920s, reacting against Expressionism.

Artists included Max Beckmann, Otto Dix and George Grosz who rejected the self-involvement and romantic longings of the expressionists and called for public collaboration, engagement, and rejection of romantic idealism.

Zero was an artist group founded in the late 1950s in Düsseldorf by Heinz Mack and Otto Piene. The artists shared a utopian desire for a new beginning and sought to transform and redefine art in the aftermath of World War II.

They wanted to depart from subjective postwar movements and de-emphasize the role of the artist’s hand. They created art that was purely about the work's materials, and world in which those materials exist, meaning light and space.

Plus, fans will be able to see important private collections such as the Marx Collection, with its focus on Andy Warhol and Pop Art as well as Joseph Beuys and Anselm Kiefer.

There's also the Ulla & Heiner Pietzsch Collection which features Surrealist works by artists including Salvador Dalí, Joan Miró and Max Ernst.

The museum is now expected to be complete in 2030, a spokeswoman for the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation says.

"All available measures have been taken to repair the damage as quickly as possible and there was no need to halt construction," she says.

The construction project, designed by Swiss architecture firm Herzog & de Meuron, was most recently estimated to cost $433 million, more than double its original budget.

The timeline for the museum's opening has already slipped. When its construction began back in 2019, the building was expected to be completed in 2026. By the topping-out ceremony last year, however, this had already been pushed back to 2029.