Aby Warburg: Bilderatlas Mnemosyne

An exhibition at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, curated by Roberto Ohrt and Axel Heil in cooperation with the Warburg Institute.
In the 1920s, Aby Warburg created his so-called Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, tracing recurring visual themes and patterns across time, from antiquity to the Renaissance and beyond. His approach provides inspiration for today’s visually and digitally dominated world. For the first time ever, all 63 panels of the Atlas have been recovered from Warburg’s original images and will be available to view in a special display at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) in Berlin.
The exhibition restores almost completely the last documented version of the 1929 atlas with the original illustrations. In collaboration with the Warburg Institute in London, the curators Roberto Ohrt and Axel Heil located most of the 971 illustrations from the 400,000 objects in the Institute’s Photo Collection and Library to show Warburg’s unfinished magnum opus in its entirety for the first time since his death.
Opening hours:
4 September – 30 November 2020
Daily except Tuesdays 12pm–7pm, Thursdays 12pm–10pm
Between Cosmos and Pathos
Berlin Works from Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas
Running concurrently to the exhibition Aby Warburg: Bilderatlas Mnemosyne – The Original, the Gemäldegalerie will be showing artworks ranging from prehistory and early history through to the modern age that Warburg used as the basis for his encyclopaedic image collection. You will be able to view a three-dimensional restaging of the collection with works from ten of the collections of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin entering into a striking dialogue with Warburg’s magnum opus.
Image: Aby Warburg, Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, Tafel 39 (wiederhergestellt, Detail) | Foto: Wootton / fluid; Courtesy The Warburg Institute