The Julia Stoschek Foundation is preparing to reopen its Düsseldorf headquarters next April, after refurbishment that closed it in spring 2025. The return will be marked by an exhibition titled “Selfish in Bed”, which looks at how people build a sense of self, image and identity around the most private piece of furniture they own.

The nonprofit was set up in 2017 by the collector Julia Stoschek and is devoted to time-based art, holding more than 1,000 works by around 300 artists. Its Berlin exhibition space closed in April as part of what the foundation called a strategic realignment, shifting attention towards international projects. The Düsseldorf building, a former factory dating from 1907, has been renovated under the architects Kuehn Malvezzi, gaining new event areas and a ceiling opening linking its two floors.

The reopening show is described by the foundation as being conceived more as a feeling than a thesis. It takes its starting point from Sarah Lucas’s 2000 self-portrait “Selfish in Bed II” and is framed as a provocation and an invitation to claim one’s own identity, image and queerness. The premise is that the bed is where people are most intimate with themselves, yet also most likely to be scrolling through phones and absorbing images of the world, so that a place of rest can double as a place of exposure.

Curated by Krist Gruithuijsen, chief executive of the Espoo Museum of Modern Art in Finland, the show will bring together 52 works by 43 artists, spanning the late 1960s to the present day, including pieces shown by the foundation for the first time. Among them are Tracey Emin’s “Why I Never Became a Dancer”, Wolfgang Tillmans’s “Peas” from 2003 and Hannah Wilke’s “Through the Large Glass” from 1976, alongside works by Sturtevant, Ed Atkins, Sophie Calle, Bruce Nauman and Wu Tsang. The works will be projected onto the building’s newly refurbished glass walls and mirrored surfaces, as well as shown on screens and monitors, in a display the foundation says will underline its commitment to feminist and queer perspectives.