With "Thomas Baumgärtel - 40 Years of Banana Sprayers", the Lower Rhine will become a large-scale walk-in exhibition in 2026: from May 8 to August 30, 2026, the show will be spread across 40 art locations between museums, studios, forums and art associations under the motto "Freedom of Art". The creators have developed a route that is expressly intended as a tour and can be discovered independently as part of a bike trip or hike, for example.
Baumgärtel, who planted his first spray banana in 1986, is thus symbolically returning to his region of origin. The idea is as simple as it is convincing: it is not a single museum that shows the artist, but an entire landscape. There are many outstanding stations. For example, the Museum Schloss Moyland in Bedburg-Hau is presenting "Kings of Hearts", a collaborative group of works by the artists Baumgärtel, Thitz and M.S. Bastian, in which pop, comics and artistic poses collide with relish.
The PAN kunstforum niederrhein in Emmerich sets a different accent with exhibition posters and billboard paintings - works in which city surfaces and layers of paper themselves become material and inscribe exhibition history. The LVR-Niederrheinmuseum Wesel shows Baumgärtel's political nerve with the "Europablock": the banana in the EU's ring of stars as an ironic disruptive signal of a Europe between awakening and uncertainty. At the Lower Rhine Museum in Kevelaer, "German Urban Pop Art" and the "Grey Images" come together; in Krefeld, kinetic objects and "Spraygramme" focus on Baumgärtel's experiments with movement, traces and spray technology. Finally, the Museum Kurhaus Kleve presents perhaps Baumgärtel's cleverest punch line with the "Künstlerbananen": the banana as homage, persiflage and universal art-historical tool.
The complete program with all locations, an overview map and individual events can be found on the official website of the "NiederrheinTour 2026".
