Museum Küppersmühle

You come to the Küppersmühle for Jaume Plensa, and you stay for the building. Herzog & de Meuron converted this former grain mill in Duisburg’s inner harbour into a museum in 1999 and extended it in 2021. It is one of the rare museums where architecture doesn’t just house the art but holds its own against it. Solid brick and volumes that are almost blind to the outside keep the site’s industrial memory. Inside, the light is calm and the proportions are exact. The extension looks as if it had always been there, which may be the highest praise an extension can get.

The permanent display, the Ströher Collection, is a deep dive into German post-war art. Anselm Kiefer dominates, with surfaces of lead, ash and straw that weigh as much as the history they summon. Around him hang Gerhard Richter, Georg Baselitz and Sigmar Polke. Kiefer feels inevitable here: an artist of ruins inside a building that outlived its own purpose.

Jaume Plensa – Invisible is the Catalan sculptor’s most comprehensive solo show to date. It has more than fifty sculptures, works on paper and wall drawings made for the museum. It is well staged and knows where to strike. The high point is the silo. There, Invisible Anna, a huge transparent head made of steel rods, fills the cylindrical space like a thought that refuses to solidify. Plensa treats the face as a threshold between presence and absence. The work doesn’t overwhelm you; it leaves you alone with yourself.

Plensa is worth the trip. But in Duisburg, the real masterpiece is the Küppersmühle itself.

“The hidden harmony is stronger than the visible one.”
-- Heraclitus, fragment B54