Museum Insel Hombroich

That there is such a thing as ‘die Insel’, is a miracle. What’s happening there could not have been predicted, and so it isn’t easy to describe or to grasp, either. Walter Biemel

Art in parallel to Nature . The motto of Museum Insel Hombroich was chosen to echo a statement of Paul Cézanne’s – that art is a harmony parallel to nature; and it captures the spirit of the Museum’s fostering concept of creating a space as an ideal in both museum and landscape terms. It was in order to be able to present a major collection of art that the collector Karl-Heinrich Müller conceived it, in conjunction with the artists Gotthard Graubner (installation of the collection) and Erwin Heerich (walk-in sculptures) and the landscape planner Bernhard Korte (landscaping).

Opened to the public in 1987, Museum Insel Hombroich comprises a 21-hectare, conservation-grade landscape and is an exclusively daylight museum with ten walk-in sculptures some of which are used as exhibition buildings. To make art and nature a sensory experience, not only has artificial lighting been dispensed with but also all labelling, signposts, captions under works of art, barriers and so on, and for that matter, didactic material of any kind.