Louise Bourgeois, Roni Horn, Cathy Wilkes in KAFKA:1924
26 October 2023—11 February 2024
Group Exhibition at Villa Stuck, Munich, Germany
On the occasion of the 100th On the anniversary of Franz Kafka's death, the Museum Villa Stuck refers to the boundless topicality of the writer in a large-scale exhibition with contemporary artists.
"Like a dog!" He said it was as if shame should survive him. With this sentence, Franz Kafka ends his novel "The Process" and names a central theme of his work: Shame. She and many other topics associated with Kafka's work have actually survived the writer and gained a universal and everlasting independence as "kafkaesk". Where fear, despair, eerie and claustrophobic conditions, bureaucratic narrowness and abuse of power prevail, a mental bridge to Kafka is often built. From this, many artists who are at the center of the exhibition have received important impulses.
On view are positions in art from the 20th and 21st centuries that explicitly or implicitly refer to Kafka. Figures from stories and novels by Franz Kafka introduce the individual topics: The officer from the "criminal colony", Gregor Samsa from the "Transformation", Karl Rossmann from "The Lost", the surveyor K. from the "Schloss", the nameless animal from the "Bau" and of course Josef K. from the "Process".
The presentation is thematically and spatially designed in such a way that the works complement each other. New perspectives are always opening up, which make the tour a space of experience. The exhibition breaks the educational-bourgeois Kafka reception and is aimed at a wide audience. Comics introduce the topic in a low-threshold and show different facets of the individual protagonists from Kafka's writings.
Works by the following artists can be seen: Ida Applebroog, Louise Bourgeois, Berlinde De Bruyckere, Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, David Claerbout, Robert Crumb, Robert Gober, Rodney Graham, Andreas Gursky, Mona Hatoum, Roni Horn, Teresa Hubbard and Alexander Birchler, Tetsuya Ishida, Sebastian Jung, Franz Kafka, Konrad Klapheck, Alfred Kubin, Maria Lassnig, David Zane Mairowitz, Margot Pilz, Paula Rego, Germaine Richier, David Rych, Anri Sala, Heidrun Sandbichler, Thomas Schütte, Chiharu Shiota, Via Lewandowsky, Ignacio Uriarte, Maja Vukoje, Jeff Wall, Franz Wanner and Cathy Wilkes.
