Bayerische Staatsoper, Munich

Elmgreen & Dragset: „Silent wishes and broken dreams ...“

May 31 – July 31, 2011

The potential for exciting and thought-provoking dialogue between theatre and fine art is amply demonstrated by the theatrical-performative installations by Danish-Norwegian artist duo Elmgreen & Dragset. The groups of works they presented in the Bayerische Staatsoper responded in various ways to the opera’s 2010/2011 season theme of unfreely free while at the same time forging a bridge between the institution of theatre and real life.

The exhibition showed theatrical sets involving exaggerated reiterations of scenes of human activity in all their complexity. In this respect, the Bayerische Staatsoper proved, in many ways, an enhancing environment for the works by Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset from the Sammlung Goetz. The works entered into a dialogue with the public as well as with the historical architecture of the operahouse, vividly symbolising the role that opera still plays even today as a mirror of human desires and the universal questions of love, jealously and social convention. It is, above all, the way they address the opposite poles of the private and the public, and their analyses of sociological structures and conflicts, that lend the work of Elmgreen & Dragset its potent social relevance, making it positively predestined for such an unusual form of presentation in a public but non-museum context. Coinciding with this exhibition, films by Elmgreen & Dragset as well as Laurie Simmons were screened at Pavillon 21 MINI Opera Space – a Bayerische Staatsoper’s temporary mobile performance venue.

The exhibition was a joint project of Bayerische Staatsoper, Museum Villa Stuck and the Sammlung Goetz. It was curated by Verena Hein und Karsten Löckemann.

Elmgreen & Dragset: „Silent wishes and broken dreams …“

16 pages, 6 ill., softcover
German/English

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Cyrill Lachauer. The Sunset Route

June 20 – September 27, 2026 | Kunstpalais Erlangen

feat. Mike Brodie, Mouse Green, Rhyw, Mia Justice Smith, Moritz Stumm

In the exhibition The Sunset Route, on view at the Kunstpalais Erlangen and created in collaboration with the Sammlung Goetz, Cyrill Lachauer presents works from 2020 to 2025, a period during which he traveled on freight trains through the USA, Mexico, and Bosnia. In the spirit of poetic ethnography, he created photographs and films that are now being shown together for the first time. They all explore questions of freedom, self-determination, and resistance, as well as colonization, exclusion, and exploitation.

Laurie Simmons. Dollhouse Photographs

June 25 – August 30, 2026 | Deutsches Theatermuseum

The American artist Laurie Simmons is known for her photographs featuring tiny dolls representing stereotypical female roles in domestic interiors. The exhibition, a collaboration between Sammlung Goetz, Deutsches Theatermuseum and Filmfest Munich, presents a selection of works by Simmons that cast a critical gaze at gender stereotypes in the American middle class.

Sterling Ruby

July 16 – October 24, 2026 | Sammlung Goetz /Schaufenster

The American artist Sterling Ruby, who lives and works in Los Angeles, is known for his multi-disciplinary body of work, which includes sculptures, ceramics, bronzes, collages, textiles, and expansive spray-painted canvases in which he intertwines a wide variety of autobiographical, art historical, and sociological sources. Through deconstruction and reconstruction, Ruby explores the idea of a non-hierarchical and borderless universe. The exhibition at the Sammlung Goetz /Schaufenster lends insight into his multifaceted artistic practice through a selection of works created between 2008 and 2016.

Jeff Wall

November 17, 2026 – February 20, 2027 | Sammlung Goetz /Schaufenster

Canadian artist Jeff Wall is one of the most influential photographers of our time. In his elaborately staged pictorial compositions, he combines the narrative of cinema with painting. Wall became known for his large-format lightbox images, which are formally more reminiscent of the world of advertising than that of fine art. With this technique, he revolutionized the medium of photography, elevating it to the height of painting and sculpture. The exhibition at the Sammlung Goetz /Schaufenster presents a selection of his iconic lightbox images from the 1990s.