From April 1st, the Georg Kolbe Museum will present an exhibition of sculptures by the important constructivist artist Marlow Moss. It is the first major exhibition of this pioneering artist in Germany – a key figure in abstract art is brought into focus.
Image above: Marlow Moss, undated, unknown photographer, image courtesy of Florette Dijkstra
The British artist Marlow Moss (1889–1958) is a central, yet long overlooked figure in European abstract art. As a founding member of the Parisian group Abstraction-Création, Moss was part of the international avant-garde. Her close exchange with the artist Piet Mondrian was formative—and reciprocal: Mondrian, too, was influenced by Moss’s formal investigations.
Moss’s work remained hidden in the shadows of art history for a long time. This is inextricably linked to a complex history of loss. In 1944, a bombing raid destroyed a large portion of the works she had been forced to leave behind in France when she fled Nazi persecution as an artist of Jewish origin. Her escape took her via the Netherlands back to England. Her distance from the art centers of the postwar period, as well as her queer self-conception and conscious rejection of societal norms, further contributed to her exclusion from the established canon.
The fragmentary surviving evidence of Moss’s oeuvre is the starting point of the exhibition. Presented for the first time in Germany with a focus on sculpture, works and archival materials from international collections open up new perspectives on Marlow Moss as a radical and influential voice of modernism.
In this exhibition, Marlow Moss enters into a dialogue with the artists Leonor Antunes (1972), Tacita Dean (1965), Florette Dijkstra (1963), and Ro Robertson (born 1984). With works created specifically for the exhibition or shown here for the first time, they establish new connections to Moss’s work and create an encounter between past and present.
The exhibition brings together loans from important museums and archives in Great Britain, the Netherlands, Switzerland, France, the USA and Germany, as well as numerous private collections.
The project is curated by Dr. Lucy Howarth and Dr. Elisa Tamaschke.
A bilingual catalogue (German/English) will be published by Hirmer Verlag and will be available for the press tour.
The exhibition opens on April 1, 2026, at 6:00 p.m. At 7:00 p.m., Dr. Kathleen Reinhardt (Director of the Georg Kolbe Museum), Hester Somsen (Ambassador of the Kingdom of the Netherlands), and the exhibition curators, Dr. Lucy Howarth and Dr. Elisa Tamaschke, will welcome guests.
The press conference will take place on April 1, 2026, at 11:00 a.m. at the Georg Kolbe Museum. The artists Leonor Antunes, Florette Dijkstra, and Ro Robertson will be present, along with the curators, Dr. Lucy Howarth and Dr. Elisa Tamaschke, and the Director, Dr. Kathleen Reinhardt.
The press tour will be conducted in German and English.
Our accompanying program includes lectures, artist talks, and more. With Leonor Antunes and Tacita Dean, guided tours and workshops for children and young people. Further information on all events will be available soon on our website.
The exhibition is supported by the German Federal Cultural Foundation, the Art Mentor Foundation Lucerne, the Ernst von Siemens Art Foundation, the Embassy of the Netherlands in Germany, and the Friends of the Georg Kolbe Museum. The contributions by Florette Dijkstra and Ro Robertson are made possible with the support of the Mondriaan Fonds (Dijkstra) and the British Council (Robertson).
WHEN?
Opening: Wednesday, 01. April 2026, 6 pm
Exhibition: Thursday, 02. April – Sunday, 26. July 2026
WHEN?
Georg Kolbe Museum
Sensburger Allee 25
14055 Berlin
