This photograph shows a ball with an eye projected onto it, lying on the floor.

Sammlung Goetz

Matthew Barney – Tony Oursler – Jeff Wall

July 22, 1996 – January 31, 1997

This exhibition at Sammlung Goetz united the works of three North American artists and focused on one general theme: contemporary human nature.

Matthew Barney, Tony Oursler and Jeff Wall are among the most interesting artists of the closing twentieth century. Their photographs, films, videos and video installations take up central issues of human relationships and identify complex biological, social and political constellations. Although they are preoccupied with the state of human nature today, they choose timeless imagery.

In Matthew Barney's photographs and films, mysterious entities – somewhere between humans and animals – populate opulent visual worlds. Tony Oursler awakens his dolls to life using video projections and renders them conversational partners in absurd dialogues. The perfectly staged photographs of Jeff Wall, presented in large lightboxes, are reminiscent of the artificiality of film sets. The exhibition in Sammlung Goetz displayed current works by the three North American artists created during the 1990s.

Matthew Barney – Tony Oursler – Jeff Wall

96 pages, 55 ill., softcover
German/English
1996, Kunstverlag Ingvild Goetz GmbH, Hamburg
ISBN 3-9805267-0-4

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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. Her series In and Around the House (1978/79) is exemplary for this set-up photography. The series is the centerpiece of the exhibition, with 56 black-and-white images showing a doll occupied with the mundane chores of a housewife in the cozy environment of a dollhouse. The exhibition “Laurie Simmons: Dollhouse Photographs”, a collaboration of Sammlung Goetz, Deutsches Theatermuseum and FILMFEST MÜNCHEN, 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

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

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.