BAD by Gregor Schneider

The National Museum of Art, Bucharest, 24 October 2026-14 March 2027.

Supported by Goethe Institut Bukarest, Artwill, Dumagas, The Friends of The National Museum of Art and Banca Transilvania - the Official Partner of The National Museum of Art.

Gregor Schneider (1969) is one of the most internationally famous German artists of today. Professor at Kunstakademie Duesseldorf, he was awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale for his world-shocking Totes Haus u r exhibited at the German Pavilion in 2001. Since then, his controversial and provocative, but always substantial and extremely influential works, events, performances and installations address acute artistic, social, historical and political issues all over the world.

NMAR, The National Museum of Art Bucharest, in collaboration with Goethe Institut Bukarest, will organize and open the major spatial course BAD by Gregor Schneider from October 2026 to March 2027. The exhibition in Bucharest runs in parallel with the large exhibition Gregor Schneider at Kunsthalle Duesseldorf, Haus u r 2026 (17.10.2026-17.01.2027). The relationship between the two exhibitions and the partnership between the two organizing institutions, NMAR and Kunsthalle Duesseldorf is underlined by the livestreaming videoinstallation Haus u r, at NMAR, placed at the entrance of the temporary exhibiting spaces of the museum, permanently connecting the Haus u r with the exhibition in Duesseldorf and Bukarest concomitantly.

BAD by Gregor Schneider is a large spatial course, a concatenation of 5 identical, communicating bathrooms, mounted on the ground floor of the National Gallery, in the Stirbey Wing of NMAR. Their size, design, bathroom fixtures, lighting and every detail is entirely the same. They reflect the current assumptions on cleanliness, comfort, accessibility, and unproblematic serviceability. Yet precisely in this unproblematic readiness lies the problem, as it becomes a trap-like contrivance, like any comfortable, at-hand solution to a need, turned into a compulsive habit.

Except for the bathrooms’ topographic placement in the exhibition hall and their sophisticated inter-connection in a compelling trajectory, the visitor’s experience will be the one of being lost in one and the same bathroom, unable to advance into the proper “exhibition”.  Each door of a bathroom opens to the next bathroom, and so on and so forth.

BAD is about the captivity of each and every one into the echo-chamber of one’s own habits, thoughts and environment. Dwelling, strolling, consuming culture and eliminating thinking, cleanliness and alienation, progressing while keeping in fact into a circuit of same-sense prejudices, as well as losing control in apparently the most innocuous and utilitarian circumstances are brought forth by Gregor Schneider’s truly immersive rooms, able to put a question mark on what he calls vanished realities and cryptotopias.

Erwin Kessler, curator

General Director of the National Museum of Art