The Baden State Museum in the German city of Karlsruhe, due to begin renovations in September 2025, has decided to move to the nearby Baden-Baden State Gallery, raising alarm bells amid cuts to the state’s arts and culture budget. .
The Baden State Museum is closing to allow for renovations to the landmark palace that houses it; the restoration is expected to take five years to complete. The institution’s permanent collection covers more than 50,000 years of international culture, art and regional history.
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As part of the move of the Baden-Baden Museums to the Lichtentaler Allee space, Eckart Köhne, Director of the Baden State Museum, will be responsible for both institutions from May 2025 to 2030. However, the museum’s administrative offices will remain in Karlsruhe.
Baden-Baden will continue its planned project in early 2026, with the first joint presentation with the Baden National Museum expected in mid-2026. The latter museum plans to host rotating exhibitions highlighting works from its collection. (Because Baden-Baden is an art museum, it does not have a permanent collection.)
A spokesman for the German Culture Ministry said high staff turnover and reduced attendance put Baden-Baden “in a challenging situation”. Arne Braun, State Secretary at the Baden-Württemberg Ministry of Science, Research and Art, therefore believes that this decision is beneficial to both institutions. “In many areas of society, we are seeing new forms of partnerships and collaborations between agencies providing more innovation, flexibility, visibility and excitement than if each agency remained in its own universe,” he told us monopoly.
However, the state claims the art gallery will not close permanently.
But some critics say the actions taken by the state are unprecedented. Outgoing director of the Baden-Baden Kunsthalle Çagla Ilk, whose contract expires on April 30, 2025, described the move as “a unique event in the history of the Federal Republic” and said she believed Baden The Kunsthalle Baden may be closed as a result.
Starting in 2026, Ilke, who served as curator of the German pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale, will become artistic director of the Maxim Gorky Theater in Berlin, and she plans to move with some of her staff in Baden-Baden.
However, the German culture ministry said the institution would not be closed permanently, adding that consolidating its direction was only a transitional phase in the restructuring, given that the directorship would soon be vacant. (It plans to rehire the Baden-Baden director in about five years.)
