Exhibition season 2026

Kunstraum München launches its 2026 exhibition season with a program featuring Edith Saldanha, Michail Pirgelis, Charlotte Eifler, Mio Okido, Carsten Fock, Eva Raschpichler, and many more.

Edith Saldanha kicks off the year with Skin Bodies (January 16–25) featuring SKIN.BODIES I, a video installation combining video, costume, text, and sound and exploring the impact of institutional and structural violence on the body, performance, and subjectivity. Spanning nine scenes, the work navigates themes of conformity, resistance, and transformation. At its core is skin–as an archive of violence and memory and the site of potential change.

In Hawaiian Hills (February 26–April 19) Michail Pirgelis introduces his latest work series in a site-specific installation spanning two floors. The works are crafted from original red-and-white striped aircraft parts–abstracted fragments of flags. Pirgelis intervenes to varying effect in the design of these found materials using cutouts and other surface treatments. With their red stripes, white backgrounds, and consistent formats, the works recall abstract Minimal Art paintings. Yet the title Hawaiian Hills, evokes a space of longing that seems at odds with a conceptual approach.

Charlotte Eifler’s work combines moving images, extended reality, installation, and performance. Her artistic research is located at the intersection of digital culture, queerness, archival politics, and speculative futures. For her show in Munich, she revisits the topic of misdirection–a technique used to manipulate perception and visual memory that is also employed in magic, warfare, politics, and theft. Eifler’s Troubled Fantômes (April 30–June 7) draws on the method to link instrumentalized magic and algorithmic prediction. She also transforms the Kunstraum into a combined museum, catwalk, and crime scene–a hybrid site where both visible and invisible traces of colonial collecting practices, issues of repatriation, and conflicted approaches to cultural heritage converge.

Berlin-based conceptual artist Mio Okido explores global cultures of collective memory. Her archival and urban research projects and collaborations with organizations and institutions address German history–particularly Munich’s Nazi past–from the perspective of an artist from Japan, a former ally of the Nazi regime. Okido’s work focuses on the collective everyday complicity of ordinary citizens and how that complicity is reflected in both the media and urban space. Her exhibition Der Tagalbtraum (June 18–July 26) turns the Kunstraum into a multimedia installation that she states “makes optimal use of the building’s potential.”

Carsten Fock’s work deals with the tensions between landscape, the history of painting, and postwar East-West German history, all of which are closely linked to his own biography. For Fock, who lives in both Bamberg and Vienna, landscape is not a neutral motif, but one steeped in history and art history. In Fault Lines (September 17–November 1), he examines the extent to which current social upheavals–including a shift to the political right, deep societal division, and the polarization of public discourse–can be reflected in aesthetic forms, and what role of painting can play in times of political uncertainty. Moods, ruptures, and tensions are visible in his paintings–landscape, architecture, and human figures each play a role.

Since 2016, Eva Raschpichler has conducted in-depth research into the work of the Munich-based filmmaker, writer, playwright, and visual artist Herbert Achternbusch (1938–2022). In her exhibition Herbert Achternbusch. Das Gespenst. Ich zeige was ich kriegen kann, oder nicht (Herbert Achternbusch. The Ghost. I Show What I Can Get, or Not) at the Kunstbunker Nuremberg in 2018, she combined her own artistic approach with numerous newly discovered and rediscovered works by Achternbusch. Her new exhibition Achterncrush (November 12–December 23) continues this approach, moving fluidly between scholarly curation and artistic intervention, meticulous research, and free-form performance.

Kunstraum München is a platform for contemporary regional and international art that also publishes artists’ catalogues and editions. Since 1973, the space has organized exhibitions of work by, among others, Agnes Martin and Richard Tuttle (1973), Franz Erhard Walther (1976, 1982, 2010, 2023), Jonas Hafner and Joseph Beuys (1981), Olaf Metzel (1982, 1990, 2002, 2023), Hanne Darboven (1988), and Gustav Metzger (1997, 1999, 2006, 2022). Since the 1990s, its program has emphasized thematic group exhibitions, with a current focus on socio-political topics.

The program is curated by its Board, which includes Patricia Drück (Vice Chairwoman), Sophie Eisenried, Lena von Geyso (Chairwoman), Nina Holm, Lennart Laule (Treasurer), Alexander Steig, Angela Stiegler, and Magdalena Wisniowska.