The film still from the Cremaster series shows a blonde, pale made-up woman sitting under a table with a white tablecloth. She is wearing a white negligee with light-coloured suspenders, has her legs spread out in front of her and covers her crotch, but looks defiantly towards the camera. Dark grapes are arranged in front of her as a symbol.
Filmmuseum Munich

Matthew Barney: CREMASTER 4 and 1

Matthew Barney's opulent five-part CREMASTER cycle handles the subject of biological and psychological processes of creation.

The American artist has worked on the production of this monumental film series since 1994. It depicts highly complex levels of action that connect historical and mythical events with architectural concepts and biological models. The cycle does not begin in chronological order, but with CREMASTER 4 (1994), followed by CREMASTER 1 (1995). Not only did Barney write the script and direct the CREMASTER cycle, he always took on one of the leading roles.
The title refers to the Latin term for the cremaster muscle, which raises and lowers the testes. In response to external stimuli, this muscle causes a contraction that cannot be deliberately influenced.

Although every film can be viewed as an independent artwork, each is simultaneously part of a closed cycle consisting of the remaining films. In cooperation with Sammlung Goetz, the Filmmuseum is showing the first two parts from the CREMASTER cycle.

Upcoming

Cyrill Lachauer. The Sunset Route

| 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

| 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

| Sammlung Goetz /Schaufenster

Los Angeles-based American artist Sterling Ruby is known for his cross-genre work, which ranges from ceramics and bronzes, collages and textiles, to enormous, spray-painted paintings. In his works, Ruby weaves together a variety of different autobiographical, art-historical, and sociological sources. Through deconstruction and reconstruction, he probes the idea of a non-hierarchical and borderless universe. The exhibition at the Sammlung Goetz /Schaufenster provides insight into his multi-layered artistic practice.

 

Jeff Wall

| 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.

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