Deborah Schamoni

For the annual commission project at Haus der Kunst, the New York based artist Maria VMier examines the relationship between individuals and memory, architecture and materiality. The artist proposes an attentive vision of working site-specifically, one that uncovers latent stories and invites new perspective for learning and unlearning.

Through conversations with staff members at Haus der Kunst, VMier collected stories, routines, and observations, which revealed personal and collective connections to the building, some shaped over a few years, others over decades. The resulting three-part installation is conceived as a journey into the immanent life of an art institution, particularly those parts that remain invisible and inaccessible to the public—in effect exploring the institution from within.

The first installation is situated at the staff entrance at the rear of the building. The weathered metal letters that once stood on the façade of the building (2012–2020) have been reassembled indoors in a new configuration. Retired from representing the identity of Haus der Kunst, they emerge as a playful and poetic phrase: “Bauch der Kunst” (the belly of the art). The work rests against the walls of a passageway used daily by staff members and delivery workers, thereby underlining an essential part of an art institution: the people who sustain the space and bring artists’ works to public view. This work is accessible during out Open Haus every last Friday of the month from 4 to 10pm.

Two large drawing installations form the central body of the project, located in the Passage, a new space for solo projects, adjacent to the auditorium and formerly part of the historic Südgalerie. The dense fields of colour, made with ink and acrylic, are based on rubbings taken with graphite and pigment from the red marble floors through the corridors. The works thus register the building as a tactile archive, with the layered compositions transposing architectural textures onto a field of marks and movement. Unfolding as a bodily and temporal encounter, the installations respond to the symmetry of the space by extending across the Passage. For VMier, the practice of drawing becomes a way of revealing the solid stone materials, and reimagining the institution as a site of accumulated traces, gestures, and material memory.

A new series of small cast aluminium sculptures is inserted into the existing openings in the marble pillars and wall surfaces of Mittelhalle and the entrance areas. The works are inspired by the water lily fossils embedded within the Saalburg marble—a material chosen to project grandeur in a hall historically used for National Socialist propaganda in the 1930s. Emerging from corners and crevices, the sculptures appear as ghostly forms suspended between facial forms and organic growth. These subtle eruptions of resistance introduce other presences inside the monumental interior, unsettling its architectural and historical authority from within.


Extending this attention to overlooked architectural details, an artist’s book produced together with VMier’s long-term collaborator The New York Board of Taste documents the openings and crevices identified by the artist around the public space, and will be on view and available at Walther König's bookstore at Haus der Kunst.

Curated by Xue Tan