In My Head

Artists: Nicole Eisenman, Jana Euler, Louis Fratino, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Deana Lawson, Martine Syms, Wolfgang Tillmans, Kara Walker

The exhibition In My Head spotlights eight contemporary artistic practices and invites visitors to delve deeply into the work of these artists. Each room offers a unique entry point into an artistic practice, allowing characteristic visual motifs, thematic concerns, and formal strategies to come to the fore. Rather than offering an exhaustive survey, the exhibition focuses on eight positions that emerge from the museum’s collection and open onto the art of the twenty-first century.

The title points to the process through which fragments of reality are absorbed and transformed in the artist’s mind, and given new form in the world through artistic practice. The featured artists draw on individual experiences and subjective perspectives. They condense emotions, impressions, and thoughts into works that extend far beyond the personal. Their practices show how perception becomes form, and how experiences of intimacy, violence, exclusion, and care can shape radically different aesthetic strategies.

The eight positions also share a sensitivity to the emotional and social conditions of their time. They engage with questions of representation and the politics of the gaze, with bodies and desire, community and exclusion, historical violence and the possibility of intimacy. Their works do not simply reflect these conditions but transform them through highly individual artistic languages.

Unlike the major avant-garde movements of the twentieth century, which consciously distinguished themselves from earlier generations, today’s artists use the artistic legacy as a living repository of images, forms, and ideas—they appropriate, shift, and reassemble them. References can be canonical, obscure, popular, intimate, or long neglected, entering into new constellations through the artists’ individual practices.

This approach becomes visible in distinct ways across the exhibition. Nicole Eisenman brings Renaissance and Baroque figuration into contact with comics, kitsch, horror, and pornography, challenging hierarchies between supposedly high and low forms. Jana Euler turns images of patriarchal self-display into awkward, comic figures of fragile masculinity, while simultaneously questioning what it means to paint such images today. Louis Fratino treats the history of painting as a living reservoir of forms and motifs, transforming them into tender scenes of queer intimacy, care, and everyday togetherness. LaToya Ruby Frazier transforms the tradition of social photography through her intimate engagement with her own family, making visible how economic and social conditions become inscribed in bodies and relationships. Deana Lawson reconfigures the conventions of portraiture through the monumental presence of her sitters, shifting the dynamics of looking between photographer, subject, and viewer. Wolfgang Tillmans approaches the world with an expansive and generous gaze, assembling heterogeneous images into open constellations that reveal unexpected affinities between intimacy, politics, friendship, and everyday life. Kara Walker turns the historically intimate medium of the silhouette into a vehicle for confronting the violence of enslavement and its afterlives. Martine Syms combines sharp social observation with wit, drawing on everyday life, found imagery, and digital culture to examine how Blackness and contemporary subjectivity are produced through images.

In My Head also makes visible a particular trajectory within the Brandhorst Collection: a commitment to following individual artistic practices in depth. The eight positions extend this approach into the present, bringing together works from the early 1990s to the most recent acquisitions. Many of the works are being presented to the public for the first time. Together, they show how the collection continues to evolve through sustained engagement with artists whose practices have helped shape, and continue to shape, the art of the twenty-first century.

With works by
Nicole Eisenman, Jana Euler, Louis Fratino, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Deana Lawson, Martine Syms, Wolfgang Tillmans, and Kara Walker.

Curated by
Benedikt Johannes Seerieder, curator at Museum Brandhorst,
with contributions by Monika Bayer-Wermuth, chief curator, and Franziska Linhardt, curator, at Museum Brandhorst.

Supported by
PIN. Freunde der Pinakothek der Moderne e.V.
Allianz, Partner von PIN. Freunde der Pinakothek der Moderne e.V.