Museum in the Kleihues Building

The “Kornwestheim City Gallery” has existed since 1975, although it did not originally have its own permanent collection or exhibition space. In the 1970s and 1980s, rotating exhibitions were presented at the municipal cultural center.

After the city received an extensive endowment of several hundred works from the estate of Manfred Henninger, the town council decided in 1987 in favor of the construction of a dedicated municipal building for the artworks. Architect Josef Paul Kleihues was commissioned to design it, and it was built in 1988/89.

The Kleihues Building was inaugurated on November 24, 1989 as part of the large-scale national exhibition dedicated to Philipp Matthäus Hahn. The first art exhibition in the new gallery came the following year with the work of Joseph Beuys. Further exhibitions included A.R. Penck (1996), Tomi Ungerer (1996), and Georg Baselitz (1997).

The building was closed for three year beginning in 2000. It re-opened in 2003 as the “Museum in the Kleihues Building.” Since then, the collection has been continuously expanded in keeping with the new museum concept, which includes rotating presentations of contemporary international artists on the ground floor, as well as an area dedicated to display’s of the city’s cultural history.

In June of 2017, the museum became part of the list of cultural heritage sites in Baden-Württemberg.