Sculptural. The new galleries is the first-ever large-scale presentation of the Hamburger Kunsthalle’s sculpture collection, spanning multiple media and periods. Across an area of 1,500 square metres, over 500 sculptures, reliefs, paintings, works on paper and photographs as well as spatial and video installations from 2,500 years of art history will prompt some surprising comparisons – antiquity versus the present day, two versus three dimensions, miniature versus monumental.

A special focus is the museum’s recently uncovered trove of »sculptures en miniature«, as the first director, Alfred Lichtwark, called these tours de force of numismatic art in the form of coins, medals and sculptural reliefs in gold, silver and bronze. These new discoveries will be exhibited alongside masterpieces in multiple media, such as larger-than-life sculptures by Auguste Rodin and Aristide Maillol, while antique portraits enter into a dialogue with contemporary photography, and reliefs by Käthe Kollwitz with body casts from the 1960s and video works by Marina Abramović and others.

The presentation developed out of the research project »From the second to the third dimension«, for which around 6,000 coins, medals and plaques are for the first time being reviewed, restored, digitised and researched in their respective contexts.