German museum opens exhibition exploring art and history through 81 different scents

(29 Oct 2025)
RESTRICTION SUMMARY:

ASSOCIATED PRESS
Düsseldorf, Germany - 28 October 2025
1. Visitor smelling scent while holding glass dome
2. Wide of visitor smelling scent UPSOUND No name given (German) “This also smells like flowers.”
3. Close of sign describing scent of 18th-century Paris streets
4. Close of visitor pushing button and smelling bad scent
5. Wide of visitors walking and looking at artwork
6. Visitor pushing button and smelling scent
7. Close of Robert Müller-Grünow smelling scent bottles
8. SOUNDBITE (German) Robert Müller-Grünow, “The Secret Power of Scents” exhibition curator:
"I looked at the eras, the centuries, but also individual objects and exhibits, and examined what role scents played in the respective times, what might have just been newly developed, what was invented, what played a societal role, and I tried to present that here using different technologies and experiential possibilities."
9. Wide of perfume display showcasing various fragrance bottles
10. Perfume bottles covered by glass domes
11. Close of perfume bottles
12. SOUNDBITE (German) Robert Müller-Grünow, “The Secret Power of Scents” exhibition curator:
"Scents are purely emotional. The only sensory stimulus that cannot be rationally filtered. It goes directly to the limbic system. It is always immediate in such a way that it creates emotions."
13. Wide of visitor interacting with futuristic art and scent installation
14. Visitor smelling scent
15. Visitor Kirsten Gnoth pressing button and smelling incense scent
16. SOUNDBITE (German) Kirsten Gnoth, visitor:
“That's really exciting, just to smell how the Parisian backstreets smelled or now in this sacred space, how everything smells of incense. Exciting, just to connect art with scents."
17. Wide of person walking past exhibit showing an elevator shaft
18. Visitor putting head inside elevator shaft exhibit
19. SOUNDBITE (German) Robert Müller-Grünow, “The Secret Power of Scents” exhibition curator:
“Here it's about infinity, in this artwork. So it's an elevator shaft that you can basically look into, which goes into infinity. And there we used the scent of space, which we recreated for NASA, so that you can basically smell infinity."
20. Pan to visitor with head inside elevator shaft, with abstract artwork displayed nearby
21. Wide of visitor walking through exhibit
22. Visitor smelling spice container
23. Tilt down of glass container with metal straw
24. Woman smelling perfume bottle
STORYLINE:
Have you ever wondered what war smells like? Or the odor of love, the stench of medieval Paris or the sacred fragrance of religion?

A new exhibition in Germany allows visitors to discover unknown worlds of smells by sniffing their way through 81 different fragrances across 37 different galleries.

The show “The Secret Power of Scents," which opens to the public on Wednesday at the Kunstpalast museum, in the western city of Düsseldorf, combines fragrances with art, taking visitors on a journey of more than 1,000 years of cultural history.

"I looked at the eras, the centuries, but also individual objects and exhibits, and examined what role scents played in the respective times, what might have just been newly developed, what was invented, what played a societal role,” said Robert Müller-Grünow, the show's curator and a leading expert in the field of scent and scent technology.

“And I tried to present that here using different technologies and experiential possibilities."



"Scents are purely emotional, the only sensory stimulus that cannot be rationally filtered,” explained Müller-Grünow.







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