Gonzalo Borondo: Mater

Mater is another place. Upon entering the exhibition, a dreamlike world opens up, challenging our senses. The exhibition route moves between installation, sound environment, and walk-through image machine; behind every threshold, a surprising turn awaits.

With Mater, the Museum Villa Stuck presents artist Gonzalo Borondo’s second intervention in Munich. In 2025, during the museum’s renovation, a white-and-gold-painted scaffolding mesh enveloped the facade like translucent skin—the project was titled Chrysalis. Now the building’s renovation is complete, the restored facade shines with renewed splendor, and the transformation continues in the monumental spaces of the Villa Stuck’s New Studio.

For Borondo, the exhibition itself is the work of art. The works are prepared over months and years but created largely on site, where they develop out of an in-depth exploration of the respective exhibition venue. As in Chrysalis, Borondo again engages with Franz von Stuck’s Gesamtkunstwerk in Mater. While the facade installation reinterpreted motifs from his paintings, the new exhibition follows the spatial dramaturgy of the artist’s villa. The artist employs spiritual imagery as a metaphor for existential and personal experiences. At the same time, he is interested in the appropriation and reinterpretation of historical artistic forms and artifacts. The eclectic character of Franz von Stuck’s artist’s villa, with its Neoclassical elements, provides an important point of reference. The exhibition route brings together classic fairy tales, ancient mythology, Baroque iconography, and electronic music. Alice encounters Pygmalion through the looking glass, Frankenstein meets the Passion of Christ, and industrial objects stand alongside sacred symbols.

At the center is art as a bridge between the tangible and the symbolic. The Latin term mater (mother) brings together the themes of origin and creation. The same word root is also found in matter, the substance of which the visible world is composed, as well as in the Spanish word madera (wood), which points to nature. Borondo explores the human longing to transform matter—a pursuit without any immediate practical purpose that nevertheless arises from the desire for transcendence. The title Mater also refers to the theme of the vessel as a symbol of origin, preservation, and transformation, which takes various forms throughout the exhibition.

The exhibition unfolds like a monumental opera and transcends traditional artistic genres. Borondo often works in collaboration with other artists. He developed the project Mater together with poet Ángela Segovia and musician Niño de Elche. Ángela Segovia is one of the most important voices in younger Spanish poetry. She has been involved in the conceptual development of the project from the outset and has written new poems specifically for the exhibition, which are part of the exhibition. Francisco Contreras Molina, known as Niño de Elche, combines flamenco with performance, electronic music, poetry, and theater. Like Borondo, he understands artistic practice as an open field between disciplines. In Mater, image, language, and sound intertwine to form a single immersive composition that visitors can move through.

For Mater, Borondo combines traditional media such as acrylic and oil painting with experimental processes involving etched glass and wax, continually developing them further. His works are characterized by craftsmanship and precision and bring together different crafts and techniques. A zoetrope, a walk-through mirror, a window made from rubble, and musical automata are presented alongside assemblages made from ecclesiastical fragments and industrial waste, altered slides in carousel projectors, and a labyrinth of glass steles featuring X-ray images.

The labyrinth was developed specifically for the exhibition and created in close collaboration with Mayer’sche Hofkunstanstalt, a family-run business founded in Munich in 1847 and one of the world’s most renowned workshops for stained glass and mosaics. The zoetrope was produced in collaboration with the Festival LuzMadrid.

Borondo relies on wonder as a way to understand the world and works with illusionistic techniques that repeatedly bring perception and reality into tension with one another. At a time when religious imagery has long since left the church and is assuming a new presence in music, fashion, film, and digital visual culture, such subjects take on a different function. Rather than primarily conveying religious certainties, they emerge as ciphers for longing, loss, community, or redemption. It is precisely in this respect that Mater has particular contemporary relevance.

An exhibition of the Museum Villa Stuck. Curated by Dr. Helena Pereña.

In cooperation with Instituto Cervantes. The X-ray labyrinth is made possible by the Alexander Tutsek-Stiftung.