Sammlung Goetz /Schaufenster

Jeff Wall

November 17, 2026 – February 20, 2027

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.

Wall studied art history in Vancouver from 1964 to 1970 while also working as a painter and sculptor. From 1970 to 1973, he pursued doctoral studies at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London and subsequently taught as a professor at various universities. He became interested in photography in 1967 and, as a self-taught photographer, produced a booklet of black-and-white photographs of Vancouver. He turned to color photography in 1976, and the following year began mounting large-format color transparencies in aluminum light boxes.
Many of his works are set in his birthplace, Vancouver, where he still lives today. The city on Canada's west coast is characterized by a post-industrial landscape and a multicultural society. Artistically, his work occupies the space between documentary photography and cinematic staging. Although his images are meticulously composed and contain numerous art-historical references, they do not convey a fixed meaning; instead, they unfold an ambiguous and unstable significance that reveals itself only during the act of viewing.

Kuratiert von Karsten Löckemann.

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.

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.

Ilinca Fechete. Memory Magnified by Memory of Course

September 5 – September 18, 2026 | AkademieGalerie

“I imagine a situation in which several people are standing together, and I am one of them. One person at a time is subjected to an electrical shock although their identity is concealed, as the electrical connection remains out of sight. All I can do is observe the facial expressions and reactions of the others to identify who has been shocked,” explains the artist Ilinca Fechete. Her new work made possible by the 2026 Media Art Award awarded by the Ingvild and Stephan Goetz Art Foundation in collaboration with the Sammlung Goetz and the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich, consists of an ultrasound sound system and a visual program for a film.