In changing exhibitions, the Osthaus Museum always offers new and intensive encounters with artists from classical modernism to the present day in its large halls. The spectrum ranges from internationally renowned masterpieces to young, provocative up-and-coming talents. In numerous special exhibitions, top-class works from the fields of: Painting, graphic art, sculpture, photography and applied art. The Osthaus Museum has a total of almost 2,500 square metres of exhibition space;
The heart of the historic Osthaus Museum is the former Folkwang Museum building. It was designed by the Belgian Art Nouveau artist Henry van de Velde on commission from the Hagen museum founder Karl Ernst Osthaus. The faithfully reconstructed interior lends this and the other rooms of the original Folkwang Museum, which opened in Hagen in 1902, a special splendour to this day. The Osthaus Museum presents its permanent exhibition here. The main focus is on art from around 1900, especially the works of important Expressionists such as Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, August Macke, Franz Marc and Alexej von Jawlensky in the historic Oberlichtsaal. A separate room is dedicated to the painter Christian Rohlfs, of whom the Osthaus Museum owns around 900 works.
In the extension to the museum, which was built in 1974, international positions on contemporary art are presented.
The Osthaus Museum Hagen has around 1000 works of painting, almost 800 sculptures and sculptures as well as around 250 artists' objects. In addition, there are over 5000 works on paper, almost 700 works of applied art and over 100 installations. The room-filling presentation "Architecture of Memory" by Sigrid Sigurdsson offers an extraordinary museum experience. In it, around 2000 folders, books and object boxes are gathered on the ground floor level of the historic old building. The spatial installation thematises the phenomenon of memory and asks about the consciousness of history, addressing and involving visitors in a variety of ways.
In 2009, a museum laboratory was set up in the basement of the historic building under the name "Junges Museum" (Young Museum), which offers, among other things, current and society-related topics in various presentations. The "Young Museum" is also a place of intercultural understanding. Art meetings, lectures and chamber concerts take place in the lounge as well as in other rooms of the museum. Public guided tours on the current exhibitions and the history of the house are regularly conducted by the museum's educational team. The Hohenhof, the former home of Karl Ernst Osthaus, is now the "Museum of the Hagen Impulse". In this Art Nouveau Gesamtkunstwerk, the architecture as well as the original interior design of the representative rooms by Henry van de Velde are impressive, and included are outstanding works of art by Ferdinand Hodler and Aristide Maillol.
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