This week and next, we are installing our new exhibition, “Symphony of Colors: Paul Signac and Neo-Impressionism,” opening on July 4, 2026. The museum remains open this week with the Impressionist collection on view. To prepare for the exhibition opening, the Barberini will be closed from June 29 through July 3, 2026.

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Sebastian Bolesch

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Art & Science

The Barberini Studio regularly hosts exciting art talks on current topics related to art in the museum:

Thu, October 1, 5.30 pm
Art meets Physics
Dr Christina Rempe and Martin Koll

The French painters Paul Signac and George Seurat took the art world by surprise in the 19th century with a completely new painting technique: instead of flat brushstrokes, where the colours had already been mixed on the palette or canvas, they applied precise dots of pure colour placed close together. They did not choose these colours at random, but based their choices on the modern theory of colour being developed at the same time by scientists such as the chemist Eugène Chevreul and the physicist Ogden Rood. The lecture bridges the gap between art and the natural sciences, as well as between the past and the present. How can the distinctive luminosity and colour brilliance of Signac and Seurat’s works be explained? And what does all this have to do with your smartphone’s display? These and other fascinating questions about the technique of Divisionism will be explored together.

Dr Christina Rempe is a Food Chemist and STEM educator; Martin Koll is a Social Scientist and Director of the NANO Science Centre in Potsdam.

 

Duration
60 minutes

Meeting point:
Foyer

Location
Barberini Studio, Humboldtstr. 4, 14467 Potsdam; next to the museum

 

Past Events:

Thu, May 28, 5:30 p.m.
Max Liebermann. From leisure activity to modern sport
Gesine Harms, art historian

From 1900 onwards, the painter Max Liebermann focused intensively on the leisure activities of the Wilhelmine upper middle class. In addition to numerous beach, bathing and sailing scenes, he mainly painted horse riders, polo players and tennis players, and with these motifs he was one of the first artists ever to address sport as a phenomenon of modern life.
The lecture shows how Liebermann gradually moved away from his preferred subjects of the harsh world of work and life in favour of new motifs of a bourgeois and tourist-oriented sports scene and landscapes as places of recreation and sporting activity.

Fri, June 5, 5:30 p.m.
Liebermann's network​
Isabelle Runde, art historian

Max Liebermann was not only an innovator in art himself, but also an influential player in the cultural politics of his time. Supported by an international network of fellow artists, gallery owners, collectors and museum directors that he had built up over the course of his life, he played a decisive role in shaping the institutional framework of modern art in Germany as co-founder of the Berlin Secession and president of the Academy of Arts.
The lecture highlights key figures in this network and shows how their collaboration enabled a lasting rethinking within the art world.

Isabelle Runde is an art historian and works as an art educator in Berlin and Potsdam, including at the Liebermann Villa on Lake Wannsee and the Berlinische Galerie.

Fri, June 19, 5:30 p.m.
Art and Media x AI
Esther Watorowski, attorney

Since 2022, we’ve all been able to talk to machines—without being computer scientists or engineers. With the help of AI chatbots, we generate text, image, audio, and video content. But these new possibilities raise many pressing legal questions, such as: 

Are my prompts and AI-generated content protected? Is a new form of copyright emerging?
Could my AI creations infringe on someone else’s copyright or personality rights?
Am I allowed to create AI images in the style of Artist X? 
What are deepfakes, and when do labeling requirements apply?
Are large AI companies permitted to crawl the internet for content and train their models using my works published online?
What does the AI Act regulate, and what transition periods are in place?
In her presentation, attorney Esther Anna Watorowski addresses these key questions and analyzes current developments from a legal perspective. The presentation is aimed at a broad audience and conveys complex content in a clear and engaging manner using numerous visual examples.

Esther Anna Watorowski is an attorney and certified data protection officer in Berlin. After twelve years working at renowned law firms and a startup, she now works independently at the intersection of IT, data protection, and labor law. She is particularly committed to communicating the law surrounding artificial intelligence and data protection in an understandable and engaging way, thereby reaching a wider audience.