Featured Events in Munich in February, 2024 (May Updated)

The Kunsthalle München presents the first major retrospective on Dutch fashion artists Viktor&Rolf in Germany. For more than three decades, Viktor Horsting and Rolf Snoeren have been exploring with breathtaking virtuosity the boundaries between the worlds of haute couture and art. Celebrated for their unconventional approach to design, their creations have been embraced by artists such as Madonna, Tilda Swinton, Lady Gaga, Doja Cat, and Cardi B and were staged in numerous ballets, as well as an opera directed by Robert Wilson. Reflecting the duo’s passions, obsessions and singular vision, the spectacular scenography will showcase 100 of their most daring creations—many exhibited for the first time—along with numerous videos, sketches, the timeless frangrances like Flowerbomb and Spicebomb, with porcelain dolls dressed in the designers’ iconic creations, and works by renowned visual artists like Andreas Gursky, Ellen von Unwerth and Herb Ritts. The exhibition is developed by the Kunsthalle München in collaboration with the Canadian curator Thierry-Maxime Loriot. He also curated the extraordinary exhibitions Jean Paul Gaultier. From the Sidewalk to the Catwalk (2015), Peter Lindbergh. From Fashion to Reality (2017), and Thierry Mugler. Couturissime (2020/21) which met with great critical and public success in Munich. Viktor&Rolf. Fashion Statements is organized by the Kunsthalle München and curated by Thierry- Maxime Loriot in collaboration with Maison Viktor&Rolf and L’Oréal Luxe.

“Afterglow", by artist Luisa Baldhuber (b. 1994, Munich), references the design of Munich’s English Garden and transposes it as an installation composed of light and wall painting in the staff entrance of Haus der Kunst. The English landscape gardens of the 18th and 19th centuries reflected the principle of a natural landscape. Despite their intended closeness to nature, these gardens are ultimately artificial parks, based on the aesthetic of landscape painting and an idealised view of nature. In this sense, the English Garden also stands for the human desire and need for a natural landscape in an increasingly industrialised and technological environment. The sharp contrast between the “wild” and romantic natural park and the Neoclassical architecture of Haus der Kunst, built at the time of National Socialism, will also be consciously addressed in the installation “Afterglow". Baldhuber’s expansive installations, in which the artist works with the interaction of coloured light and wall paint, are aimed at overcoming the spatial boundaries of an architectural space. In doing so, she draws attention to the original architecture, questioning notions of our world that manifest themselves in buildings. The abstract ceiling picture for instance takes up the minimalistic style of the Light and Space movement that originated in Southern California in the 1960s, which is an important reference in Baldhuber’s artistic work. Through the optical expansion of the space and the shifting coloured moods, “Afterglow” rouses memories of being under the open sky and lets us dream for a moment. Curated by Anna Schneider.

Martino Gamper will be in residence at Haus der Kunst, creating a series of newly designed chairs, a development of his celebrated long-running project 100 Chairs in 100 Days. During the run of the exhibition, the new chairs will be freely reconfigured by the public and the staff — to gather, to rest, and to play — turning the Mittelhalle into a vibrant, constantly changing social space. The reconfigurations will be based on a series of rules that Gamper will deliver at the beginning of the project, defining a choreography that will transform the appearance of the whole space weekly. Alongside furniture, Gamper will create a new light design that will change the atmosphere of the Mittelhalle from a usually transitory space to one of gathering. Speaking about the project, Martino Gamper said: “For Haus der Kunst, the furniture will be made in a variety of ways including craft and industrial processes, using a huge range of materials. The chairs will be experimental, fit for purpose but imperfect, rather than products they are vehicles to explore seating as a sculptural object.” The project highlights the path towards new forms of engagement and learning that Haus der Kunst started in 2023. It has been developed in cooperation between Martino Gamper, the curatorial team and the engagement and learning team at Haus der Kunst. Developed in cooperation between Martino Gamper, the curatorial team and the engagement and learning team at Haus der Kunst (Andrea Lissoni, Emma Enderby, Hanns Lennart Wiesner, Pia Linden, Camille Latreille). Martino Gamper’s Sitzung at Haus der Kunst München illuminated by Occhio.

WangShui’s practice explores various dimensions of human-machine entanglement through video, sculpture and painting. The exhibition has been developed as a form of screenplay in which the machine has become the scriptwriter, applying countless variations of its training material. Featuring their newly commissioned live simulation Certainty of the Flesh (2023) alongside a selection of ethereal paintings etched into aluminium, Window of Tolerance reflects our symbiosis with the technologies that are now determining our lives.

The exhibition title “Return” refers not only to her return to Munich, where she once studied at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in the class of Sean Scully, but also to a reflection on the return to the fundamentals of painting. Bittl’s participation in 2020 in the major show of 53 artists of today’s forty-year-olds “Jetzt! Junge Malerei in Deutschland”, exhibited by the curators of the Kunstmuseen Bonn and Wiesbaden, the Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz and the Deichtorhallen, Hamburg, places Bittl’s work in the context of the best representatives of painting as a leading discipline of art. Viola Bittl is known for her insistent and multi-layered works that explore the boundaries of painting and create a dialogical space between form and abstraction. The exhibition “Return” presents a selection of her works since 2018, including her most recent series of “New York Paintings”, which were created during a studio scholarship in New York.