Deichtor Halls
Hamburg
Creative App – Best User Picture
Hamburg’s Deichtor Halls – House of Photography, modern art
The Deichtor Halls in Hamburg are Europe’s largest indoor art exhibition space. They are divided into a display hall for contemporary art and the House of Photography. These historical halls with their cavernous, open-plan layout beneath skylighted steel roofs today provide the backdrop for international shows of spectacular scale and ambition.
A design shop, a specialist photography bookstore and the award-winning Fillet of Soul restaurant are other on-site attractions. Situated where Hamburg’s art quarter meets the HafenCity district, the Deichtor Halls are a great place to begin a cultural tour of the city.
Since 1989, more than 150 major exhibition projects have been installed in the halls. Andy Warhol, Marc Chagall, Keith Haring, Martin Kippenberger and Louise Bourgeois are among the artists to have starred in solo shows, but plenty of early exposure has also been given to up-and-coming artists. This has included comprehensive presentations of the work of Andreas Gursky (1994), Cindy Sherman (1995), Jason Rhoades (1999), Elizabeth Peyton (2001) and Jonathan Meese (2006). There have also been themed exhibitions and group shows as well as guest appearances by international art collections, most notably the Center Pompidou collection (1990) and the Goetz collection (1998/99).
No permanent collection is mounted in the Deichtor Halls. The emphasis is firmly on temporary exhibitions, despite the House of Photography being based around two collections: the F. C. Gundlach collection, one of Germany’s leading compilations of artistic and fashion photography, and the Spiegel magazine photo library, Germany’s biggest research archive for journalists, with more than three million pictures.
