Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt

About this place

The Schirn is not a museum in the ordinary sense, because it owns no permanent collection at all. It is a large exhibition hall, opened in nineteen eighty-six on the strip between the Roemerberg and the cathedral, whose entire job is to mount temporary shows. That freedom has made it the boldest art institution in the city: it can give one season to Surrealism and the next to a single living artist without any standing line to defend. The city built it on ground the war had cleared between the square and the cathedral, and the name comes from the wooden stalls, called Schirn, from which butchers once sold on exactly this spot. Over the decades the hall has staged the large surveys of Expressionism, Dada and twentieth-century art that Frankfurt residents check first when they ask what is on. Now the important warning. The original building on the Roemerberg has been shut since May twenty twenty-five for an energy refurbishment expected to run to around twenty twenty-eight. The whole programme has moved to the former Dondorf printing works in Bockenheim, a brick building from eighteen ninety, and the exhibitions will stay there until at least twenty twenty-seven. Tickets are about twelve euros, Monday is closed, and Thursday runs late to ten.