In My HeadContemporary Artistic Positions

Each room offers a unique entry point into an artistic practice, allowing the characteristic interplay of visual motifs, thamatic concerns, and formal strategies to come to the fore. Painting, photography, and sculpture are presented on an equal footing, reflecting the media diversity of the Brandhorst Collection and the Eva Felten Photography Collection.

The show focuses on works by Nicole Eisenman, Jana Euler, Louis Fratino, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Deana Lawson, Martine Syms, Wolfgang Tillmans, and Kara Walker. The featured artists draw on individual experiences and subjective perspectives. They condense emotions, impressions, and thoughts into works that extend far beyond the personal. The interplay of the pieces reveals how experiences of intimacy, violence, exclusion, or care shape aesthetic strategies.

Many of the artists in the exhibition draw on art history. 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. In addition to canonical works, the artists invoke surprising, obscure, or long-neglected references as freely as they do selectively. These historical allusions serve not as a retrospective view but as a way of opening up new artistic possibilities for making visible current worries and longings, lived realities, and different forms of coexistence.