PRESENTATION:In My Head

Featuring eight contemporary artists, the exhibition “In My Head” explores how reality is re-imagined and transformed into art within the creative mind. In line with Museum Brandhorst’s core principle of showcasing art in all its depth, this collection-based exhibition offers immersive encounters with key works across a variety of expressive mediums.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Museum Brandhorst Archive

The title, “In My Head”,  refers to the creative process by which perceived reality in the mind is trans room offers a unique insight into one artistic practice. Key works here provide a vivid questions, and formal approaches working together. Painting, photography, and scu footing, reflecting the media range of both the Brandhorst Collection and the Eva Fe

The eight positions also share a sensitivity to the emotional and social conditions of their time. They engage with questions of representation and the politics of the gaze, with bodies and desire, community and exclusion, historical violence and the possibility of intimacy. Their works do not simply reflect these conditions but transform them through highly individual artistic languages.

Unlike the major avant-garde movements of the twentieth century, which consciously distinguished themselves from earlier generations, today’s artists use the artistic legacy as a living repository of images, forms, and ideas—they appropriate, shift, and reassemble them. References can be canonical, obscure, popular, intimate, or long neglected, entering into new constellations through the artists’ individual practices.

This approach becomes visible in distinct ways across the exhibition. Nicole Eisenman brings Renaissance and Baroque figuration into contact with comics, kitsch, horror, and pornography, challenging hierarchies between supposedly high and low forms. Jana Euler turns images of patriarchal self-display into awkward, comic figures of fragile masculinity, while simultaneously questioning what it means to paint such images today. Louis Fratino treats the history of painting as a living reservoir of forms and motifs, transforming them into tender scenes of queer intimacy, care, and everyday togetherness. LaToya Ruby Frazier transforms the tradition of social photography through her intimate engagement with her own family, making visible how economic and social conditions become inscribed in bodies and relationships. Deana Lawson reconfigures the conventions of portraiture through the monumental presence of her sitters, shifting the dynamics of looking between photographer, subject, and viewer. Wolfgang Tillmans approaches the world with an expansive and generous gaze, assembling heterogeneous images into open constellations that reveal unexpected affinities between intimacy, politics, friendship, and everyday life. Kara Walker turns the historically intimate medium of the silhouette into a vehicle for confronting the violence of enslavement and its afterlives. Martine Syms combines sharp social observation with wit, drawing on everyday life, found imagery, and digital culture to examine how Blackness and contemporary subjectivity are produced through images.

“In My Head” also makes visible a particular trajectory within the Brandhorst Collection: a commitment to following individual artistic practices in depth. The eight positions extend this approach into the present, bringing together works from the early 1990s to the most recent acquisitions. Many of the works are being presented to the public for the first time. Together, they show how the collection continues to evolve through sustained engagement with artists whose practices have helped shape, and continue to shape, the art of the twenty-first century.

Works by: Nicole Eisenman, Jana Euler, Louis Fratino, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Deana Lawson, Martine Syms, Wolfgang Tillmans, and Kara Walker.

Info: Curator: Benedikt Johannes Seerieder, with contributions by Monika Bayer-Wermuth and Franziska Linhardt, curator, Museum Brandhorst, Theresienstraße 35a, Munich, Germany, Duration: 30/10/2026-30/3/2027, Days & Hours: Tue-We & Fri-Sun 10:00-18:00, Thu 10:00-18:00, www.museum-brandhorst.de/