Artists

Nicole Eisenman, Louis Fratino, Wolfgang Tillmans, Deana Lawson, Martine Syms, Kara Walker, Jana Euler, Latoya Ruby Frazier

Press release

The exhibition “In My Head” spotlights eight contemporary artistic practices and invites visitors to delve deeply into the work of these artists. The title refers to the creative process where reality is transformed in the head and transformed into art. Through key works, the exhibition fosters focused encounters with diverse artistic visions and forms of expression. This collection-based exhibition follows one of Museum Brandhorst’s guiding principles: it presents selected bodies of work in all their complexity. EXHIBITION INFO Period 30 October 2026 until 30 May 2027 Location Ground floor Curated by Benedikt Johannes Seerieder ABOUT THE EXHIBITION Each room offers a unique entry point into an artistic practice, allowing the characteristic interplay of visual motifs, thematic concerns, and formal strategies to come to the fore. Painting, photography, and sculpture are presented on an equal footing, reflecting the media diversity of the Brandhorst Collection and the Eva Felten Photography Collection. The show focuses on works by Nicole Eisenman, Jana Euler, Louis Fratino, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Deana Lawson, Martine Syms, Wolfgang Tillmans, and Kara Walker. The featured artists draw on individual experiences and subjective perspectives. They condense emotions, impressions, and thoughts into works that extend far beyond the personal. The interplay of the pieces reveals how experiences of intimacy, violence, exclusion, or care shape aesthetic strategies. JANA EULER Jana Euler takes full advantage of the possibilities of painting to explore contemporary social and psychological dynamics. Her distorted bodies and anthropomorphic figures appear as symbols of an era in which ambition and exhaustion, desire and fear, are closely intertwined. The result is a body of work in which individual emotional states and social conditions are inextricably intertwined. KARA WALKER Kara Walker works with drawing, paper cutouts, and watercolor, using these media to create delicate yet often unsettling depictions drawn from the racially charged cultural memory of the United States. She draws on visual languages and narrative patterns through which violence, shame, and desire emerge as forces that remain potent to this day. LOUIS FRATINO Louis Fratino evokes the visual languages of classical modernism to develop new representations of queer intimacy and male care. His artworks depict everyday moments of closeness and lend visibility to experiences that have long been marginalized in art-historical narratives. Many of the artists in the exhibition draw on art history. 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. In addition to canonical works, the artists invoke surprising, obscure, or long-neglected references as freely as they do selectively. These historical allusions serve not as a retrospective view but as a way of opening up new artistic possibilities for making visible current worries and longings, lived realities, and different forms of coexistence. WITH WORKS BY Nicole Eisenman, Jana Euler, Louis Fratino, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Deana Lawson, Martine Syms, Wolfgang Tillmans, and Kara Walker. CURATED BY Benedikt Johannes Seerieder, curator at Museum Brandhorst, with contributions by Dr. Monika Bayer-Wermuth, chief curator, and Franziska Linhardt, curator, at Museum Brandhorst.