With works by Paul Klee (1879–1940), Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), Henri Matisse (1869–1954), Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944), and many others, the collection of the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen represents the canon of Western modernism. For some years now, the holdings have been expanded in this area to include works by non-European artists. For a long time, Surrealism, for example, was considered a purely European movement. Yet original contributions to its development were made by artists in other parts of the world, such as Hassan El-Telmisani (1923–1987), Fouad Kamel (1919–1973), and Mayo (1905–1990), who were active members of the Art et Liberté collective in Cairo.

Globality also brings new insights for the art of the second half of the twentieth century. Rasheed Araeen, who was born in Karachi, Pakistan in 1935, emigrated to London in the 1960s. Here, he developed his characteristic sculptures based on his political involvement in the Black Panther movement. Influenced both by Minimalism and the history of abstract art in the West, as well as by traditions of abstraction in the Islamic cultural sphere, he created modular, symmetrical lattice structures of painted wooden laths reminiscent of border fences and barriers. The initial rejection by institutions and galleries has become the source of his political engagement. As a curator and founder of The Third Text magazine, Araeen campaigned strongly against the institutional invisibility of Black and Asian artists.

The current extent of globalization and its grave social consequences become the subject of several works presented at K21. The opportunities and challenges that come with globalism are critically examined in the works of contemporary artists. In the work Escapement (2009), the Raqs Media Collective – founded in New Delhi in 1992 – deals with the understanding of time and space in a globalized world, while in Haze and Fog(2013), the Chinese artist Cao Fei (b. 1978) asks what effects the rapid changes in the realities of life in a global metropolis have on the individual.