The Best Shows to See in Düsseldorf and Cologne Right Now

Amelie von Wulffen & Jonas Lipps | Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne | 26 September – 14 December

While illusionism feigns three-dimensionality and exposes the real as a staged effect, surrealism rests on the opposite premise: everything dreamlike is real. Amelie von Wulffen and Jonas Lipps draw on both, exploring alienation and estrangement through sculptural paintings and painterly drawings. Surrounded by sheets of linen featuring cartoon figures like Heidi and Fix and Foxi, von Wulffen’s works have, quite literally, learned to walk: papier-mâché creatures crawl across the floor, their bodies and faces replaced with idealized still lifes and pastoral scenes. Lipps, by contrast, levels figure and ground to emphasize modernist flatness. His repetitive, geometric renderings – depicting people, snakes, houses and vehicles, as well as abstract fields of unmixed colour reminiscent of children’s book illustrations – enable a democratic visual impression similar to that of cinema.

Helena Huneke | Drei, Cologne | 5 November – 17 January 2026

The words ‘Künstler sind keine Spekulationsobjekte’ (Artists are not objects of speculation) appear on Helena Huneke’s drawing Title unknown (2011), a strongly coloured, gesturally distorted portrait of one or more figures. Such striking yet succinct texts – alongside fabric assemblages, drawings and paintings – formed a core part of the artist’s practice until her death by suicide in 2012. ‘Der Plan’ (The Plan) marks the artist’s first solo show with Drei, uniting works from across her career, including large linen paintings (one 2002 collage work, featuring a photograph of Jutta Koether, lends the exhibition its title), early chair installations from her 1995 diploma show at HFBK Hamburg, such as Geschichtenerzähler (Storyteller), and a selection of small-format pastel paintings and drawings on paper, exhibited here for the first time. In these works, diary-like notes and manifesto-style statements coexist without hierarchy, confronting structures of inclusion and exclusion within the art world.

Laurie Smith | Gathering, Cologne | 5 November – 20 December

‘Brick Boys’, Laurie Smith’s solo debut at Gathering, Cologne, offers a visually articulate meditation on queer urban life. Depicting friends and lovers in motion across London’s night-time streets, Smith builds on his signature use of puppet-like figures, stylized yet expressive. His skewed perspectives and dense cityscapes recall Martin Wong’s depictions of queer enclaves, their gentrified neighbourhoods and distinctive brickwork. Nods to the queer cinema and literature of 1980s and ’90s New York situate the work within a broader cultural lineage. In Smith’s hands, London functions as both stage and structure: emotionally charged yet deliberately unresolved.

Elise Duryee-Browner | Cherry Hill, Cologne | 30 October – 6 December

Elise Duryee-Browner’s practice spans sculpture, text and performance, as demonstrated in her readings at Artists Space, New York, and Haus am Waldsee, Berlin, earlier this year. Her work engages with culturally charged emblems – the rainbow, the Easter lamb, the pyramid – which act as both symbols and portals, drawing on myth, religion and literature to challenge established belief systems. At Cherry Hill, aluminium prints of her New York friends’ signatures accompany an interactive computer game (Cyberball, 2025) originally used in psychological tests to show that narcissists care about how they are perceived by others. This duality prompts reflection on the complex relationship between individual attachment and market appraisal, underscoring the tensions inherent in ownership and desire.

Vincent Fecteau | Galerie Buchholz, Cologne | 6 November – 10 January 2026

For his fourth solo exhibition at Galerie Buchholz, Vincent Fecteau turns to large-scale sculpture for the first time. Working within the physical limits of his studio, he built two sculptures from everyday materials such as balloons, pool floats, foam board and layered papier mâché. This use of domestic objects, combined with paint and newsprint, continues Fecteau’s exploration of the interaction between polished surfaces and their raw, often exposed interiors. Through slow, accumulative gestures of cutting and reassembly, these works bear traces of their origins while balancing refinement with imperfection.

Haiqing Wang | Rinde am Rhein, Düsseldorf | 17 October – 23 November

In ‘The newly bought lilies on the living room table smell suspicious’, Haiqing Wang produces a fully immersive narrative environment. By reconfiguring the entrance and visitor path and dimming the lights throughout the space, she transforms the exhibition into an extended spatial fiction in which some of the artist’s personal belongings, as well as her shadow – captured in a long-exposure photograph (Self-Portrait, 2024) – linger like evidence at a crime scene. Through engagement with trace, scale and associative logic, as in the room installation Self-Portrait (Room) and its reiteration as a model in Still Life (Color) (both 2025), the show invites viewers to inhabit storytelling as a lived experience of ambiguity and displacement.

‘When the World Went Out of Tune with Itself’ | Inter Media Art Institute & Approximation Festival, Düsseldorf | 18 October – 29 November

Delia Derbyshire, a pioneering electronic music composer and key member of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, played a crucial role in shaping British electronic music. In the 1970s she collaborated briefly but impactfully with Elsa Stansfield, a visual and sound artist known for integrating field recordings, video feedback and early digital technology. Anchored in their innovative partnership, ‘When the World Went Out of Tune with Itself’ explores the feminist legacy of experimental electronic soundtracks. The programme unfolds through site-specific interventions across Düsseldorf – including a sonic experiment in the Hofgarten, a listening session at the city opera house, a screening and artist talk at Filmwerkstatt and a workshop and concert at the non-profit association About Repetition – culminating in the 20th anniversary edition of the Approximation Festival.

_{Main image: Jonas Lipps, POLICE, 2018, ‘Amelie von Wulffen, Jonas Lipps’, 2025. Courtesy: Kölnischer Kunstverein; photograph: Mareike Tocha}