Museum Ratingen

Museum Ratingen stands in the heart of the old town, a short walk from the medieval market square and parts of the old town wall with its guard towers. The building itself is a former 19th-century town house and an adjoining office block, now joined by a concrete-and-bare-brick extension that echoes the Centre Pompidou style of the 1970s. Inside, white walls and exposed ducts create a neutral shell for changing displays. The museum opened in 1926 as a local history museum and moved to this site in 1977 after decades in the old town hall.

The collection balances modern art with the town’s own past. Paintings, drawings and prints trace German art from the post-war years to today, with special rooms for Peter Brüning, an informal painter born in Ratingen. Sculptures appear both indoors and on the ‘Kunstweg’, a trail that links art and landscape. The museum also holds the estates of sculptors Maria Fuss and Doris Rücker, and a fine porcelain display devoted to Johann Peter Melchior, an 18th-century modeller whose work bridges craft and fine art.

Visitors find two floors of galleries totalling about 1,600 square metres, plus a flexible lighting grid that adapts to each exhibition. Recent shows have ranged from Renata Jaworska’s SuperLand to a centenary tribute to Hann Trier. The building sits beside the surviving stretch of town wall, so a walk round the museum can include medieval stonework and modern concrete in the same view.