URBAN NATION MUSEUM FOR URBAN CONTEMPORARY ART
Urban contemporary art on every corner – Bülowstraße in Schöneberg
On building walls and lamp posts, in U-Bahn stations and building sites – urban contemporary art greets the attentive observer at every turn in Berlin. And Bülowstraße particularly catches the eye: the passer-by quickly becomes a gallery visitor.
On the walls of buildings and lampposts, in underground stations and on building fences - the attentive observer encounters urban contemporary art at every turn in Berlin.
Urban contemporary art on every corner
Bülowstraße is particularly eye-catching: here, passers-by quickly become gallery visitors. The spray-painted and pasted artworks are so abundant in this lively part of Schöneberg that you could be forgiven for thinking you were in the middle of an exhibition, you could be standing in the middle of an exhibition of Urban Art in the open air. There is something to discover everywhere.
Urban Nation - Network
At regular intervals, URBAN NATION, a Berlin street art network and museum, brings national and international artists to the city. Since 2013, URBAN NATION has created a total of around 50 large-format and many smaller works (murals). Street art greats such as Shepard Fairey, 1UP and Lady Pink have already pulled out their cans here. Their works of art can be seen all over the street and in the neighbouring streets, sometimes as metre-high murals, sometimes very small, almost hidden on pillars and shutters. This mixture of spontaneous street art and curated murals makes the street a lively place of art.
An entire house as a work of art
Image gallery
The four-storey residential and commercial building at number 7 stands out in particular. It can be seen from the above-ground underground railway. At regular intervals, a street artist transforms the entire façade into a gigantic mural. EINE has sprayed the words "Revolution" on the façade in metre-high, colourful letters. DALeast has made a golden eagle fly over the building. And the Iranian brothers Icy & Sot depicted a scene of the fall of the Berlin Wall on the building, based on an original photo. In 2024, Lady Pink transformed the façade into a fantastic cityscape with motifs from Berlin and New York.
A network becomes a museum
The Wilhelminian-style building was converted into the URBAN NATION MUSEUM FOR URBAN CONTEMPORARY ART in 2017 according to plans by architecture firm GRAFT. The museum is a globally unique centre for exhibitions, research and exchange in the field of urban contemporary art. It presents regularly changing exhibitions from its own unique collection as well as loans and commissioned works, houses the artist residencies of the Fresh A.I.R. scholarship programme and the Martha Cooper Library. Photojournalist Martha Cooper was the first to make the emergence of urban art visible through her photo documentaries.
Interactive and changeable
As is typical of urban art, the museum is constantly changing its appearance with changing murals and becomes a work of art itself. The museum is a place for working, cross-media exchange, networking, research and teaching. Educational formats and interactive workshops invite visitors to join in. The exhibition space is crossed by a highline, a walkway that allows visitors to view the artworks from different perspectives across two floors.
URBAN NATION is backed by Gewobag's Berliner Leben foundation, which not only promotes art and culture with its commitment, but also promotes social neighbourhood development. In Bülowstraße, the combination of art, social exchange and education creates a place that culturally revitalises the neighbourhood and sees the urban space as part of a community development process. This has been more than impressively achieved in Schöneberg's Bülowstraße.
