Exhibition program 2022

The year 2022 starts with the group exhibition WALK! (February 18–May 22, 2022), which provides an overview of walking as a practice in contemporary art production—a facet that has so far been rarely considered. On view are about 100 works by more than 40 international artists who use walking as an essential element, including Yuji Agematsu, Allora & Calzadilla, Francis Alÿs, James Bridle, Tiffany Chung, Sebastián Díaz Morales, Hamish Fulton, Özlem Günyol & Mustafa Kunt, Fabian Herkenhoener, Jan Hostettler, Kubra Khademi, Bouchra Khalili, Pope.L, and Milica Tomić.

At the same time artist Carlos Bunga (February 18–May 22, 2022) is showing an architectural installation, which he develops especially for the Schirn Rotunda. His monumental work, constructed with everyday materials such as pieces of furniture, cardboard, and tape, responds to the architecture of the publicly accessible space. By walking through it, the space initiates a physical and mental experience and enters into a dialogue with the exhibition WALK!.

In the overview exhibition Art for No One: 1933–1945 (March 4–June 6, 2022), the Schirn shows the different strategies and scopes of action employed by artists who remained in Germany during National Socialism but did not seek or find any affiliation with the regime. Their situation is often described in a generalized way as “ostracism” or “inner emigration.” Based on 14 selected biographies, the exhibition illustrates that these terms fall short of the mark in consideration of the complex and divergent personal circumstances. The artists represented are Willi Baumeister, Otto Dix, Hans Grundig, Lea Grundig, Werner Heldt, Hannah Höch, Marta Hoepffner, Karl Hofer, Edmund Kesting, Jeanne Mammen, Ernst Wilhelm Nay, Franz Radziwill, Hans Uhlmann, and Fritz Winter.

In summer, the Schirn dedicates a major exhibition to the renowned Swiss conceptual and installation artist Ugo Rondinone. For Life Time (June 24–September 18, 2022), Rondinone is grouping key paintings, sculptures, and video works into new constellations and sequences. The unique installation extends along the entire length of the gallery as well as into the Rotunda and combines fundamental themes that have shaped his work for the past 30 years: time and transience, day and night, reality and fiction, nature and culture.

Parallel to this, the Dutch artist Aernout Mik (July 7–October 3, 2022) presents the video installation Double Bind (2018), as well as Threshold Barriers (2022), which was conceived specially for the exhibition. Both works pursue the notions and dynamics of security and threat, power and powerlessness in public space and enter into dialogue with each other.

In fall, the Schirn is presenting the multilayered photographic work of the Indian artist and photographer Gauri Gill (October 13, 2022–January 8, 2023) for the first time in an extensive survey exhibition. On view are around 200 pieces from pivotal series with which Gauri Gill has been focusing on barely perceived areas in Indian society, outside the urban centers. In an open, collaborative process that eschews documentary conventions, she has dedicated herself to concerns related to survival and self-assertion, identity and belonging, and also to conceptual questions of memory and authorship.

A highlight in 2022 is the exhibition Chagall: World in Turmoil (November 4, 2022–February 19, 2023), which focuses on a so far little-known side of this modernist poet. In the works of the 1930s and 1940s, Marc Chagall’s colorful palette becomes darker. The life and work of the Jewish painter were profoundly affected by the art policies of the National Socialists and the Holocaust. By the early 1930s, Chagall’s works were already examining the increasingly aggressive anti-Semitism in Europe, and he finally emigrated to the United States in 1941. With more than 100 haunting paintings, works on paper, photos, and documents, the exhibition traces the artist’s search for a pictorial language in the face of expulsion and persecution.

The overview of the 2022 exhibition program ends with a preview of the exhibition Niki de Saint Phalle in spring 2023, which sheds light on the wide-ranging work of this extraordinary artist. Niki de Saint Phalle developed her art based on her processing of very personal emotions and on a radically feminist position. She took up social and political topics, criticized institutions and role models, and with her art addressed public discourses that still have relevance today.

You will find the complete 2022 exhibition program of the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt here.

Director: Dr. Philipp Demandt
Press contact: Julia Bastian (Interim Head of Press/Public Relations):
presse [​at​] schirn.de / T +49 (0) 69 29 98 82 148
Press material: schirn.de