Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin

260px-InvalidenstrBerlin_12-2017_img1Hamburger Bahnhof is the former terminus of the Hamburg-Berlin Railway in Berlin, Germany, on Invalidenstrasse in the Moabit district opposite the Charité hospital. Today it serves as a contemporary art museum, the Museum für Gegenwart, part of the Berlin National Gallery.

n the mid-1980s the Berlin entrepreneur Erich Marx offered his private collection of contemporary art to the city. The Berlin Senate decided in 1987 to establish a museum of contemporary art in the former railway station. The Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation agreed to operate the museum as part of the National Gallery. A competition for the renovation of the station was announced by the Senate in 1989, and was won by the architect Josef Paul Kleihues.

Between 1990 and 1996, Kleihues refurbished the building, and in November 1996 the 108,000 sq ft (10,000 m2) museum was opened with an exhibition of works by Sigmar Polke. The Museum für Gegenwart exhibits modern and contemporary art. Permanent loans from the Marx collection, including works by artists such as Joseph Beuys, Anselm Kiefer, Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly and Andy Warhol, are on permanent display. An emphasis of the Nationalgalerie collection is art on video and film, including a collection of 1970s video art—a gift of Mike Steiner—and the Joseph Beuys media archives.

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