They questioned everything: material, space and perception. The post-war avant-garde radically broke with conventions, making materiality itself the core of their art. Names such as Richard Serra, Phyllida Barlow, Robert Morris, Charlotte Posenenske, Dadamaino, Gary Kuehn, Carl Andre, Donald Judd, Fred Sandback, Reiner Ruthenbeck and Hanne Darboven represent a generation that explored matter, the presence of objects in space and the role of observation.
These artists took different paths: in their works, rigour and seriality meet chance and instability, physical laws meet sensual-spatial experience. What they have in common, however, is that they make materiality itself the core of their work, thereby redefining the conditions of artistic experience. Art is no longer narrated – it is experienced, felt and thought. At its heart is the direct relationship between humans and matter, the intense interplay of body and space.Photos: Jens Gerber. Design: Off Office, Munich
In the work of sculptor Alf Lechner (1925–2017), material steps out of its seemingly passive role to become an active participant in the artistic process. The new monograph Alf Lechner: Material als Akteur (Material as Agent) by Dominik Bais, opens up a production-aesthetic perspective on Lechner’s work, shedding light on the infrastructural and economic conditions of art production that are often overlooked. Featuring previously unpublished photographs, notes, and documents, and with a design that emphasises the material dimension of the content, this book offers fresh insights into the artist and the role of matter in artistic production.Photos: Edward Greiner. Book design: Off Office, Munich
For Alf Lechner, steel was not a passive material, but an active agent with its own independence and resilience. His later works in particular reveal how he explored the unpredictability and complexity of the material and made its inherent dynamics visible. Lechner saw steel as a co-author of his sculptures, whose reactions and processes helped determine their form. His works illustrate that material is not only shaped, but also shapes itself – a concept that raises social and philosophical questions beyond the realm of art.Photos: Jens Gerber. Design: Off Office, Munich.
Abstract and mysterious: Lisa Seebach's (born 1981) sculptures are reminiscent of industrial objects such as gas cylinders or oil drums, which become autonomous actors in a poetic and enigmatic staging full of associative meta-narratives. In the thicket of post-apocalyptic science fiction, black utopia and posthuman aesthetics, they point to possible threats in the face of dystopian escalation and explore ways of escaping them. Earthy Liquids and Heavy Metal [Hypersleep] is Lisa Seebach's largest solo museum exhibition to date and features numerous works from the last ten years as well as works conceived specifically for the rooms of the Lechner Museum. The publication of the same name brings together numerous installation views and accompanying texts.Design: Lukas Schimpfhauser, Munich. Photos: Jens Gerber.
The works of sculptor Lisa Seebach (born 1981) unfold a dystopian space that leads from the measurable world into an imaginary reality. The starting point is the artist's hand drawings, which she stages as steel structures and balances between materiality and dematerialisation with ceramic counterweights. Abstract and mysteriously distorted, the sculptures allude to objects such as gas cylinders or oil drums, which thus become aesthetic actors in a poetic and enigmatic staging. This creates a paradoxical scene full of associative meta-narratives between post-apocalyptic science fiction and black utopia.Photos: Jens Gerber. Design: Lukas Schimpfhauser, Munich.
'Stories only exist in stories.' This sentence is noted by the screenwriter in Wim Wenders' pessimistic deconstruction of film work, 'Stand der Dinge' (1982), and is used to emphasise the self-referential, autopoietic nature of the narrative form. In doing so, the protagonist refers to a story-like organisation of reality that produces history, which appears to stand in opposition to a discrete, material archaeological gaze. This is a gaze that makes no attempt to fill the gaps in the data with empathetic imagination. However, examining the plaster sculptures reveals an ongoing process of reproduction, in which narratives and images are repeated and varied. In the process, we realize that it is not the sculptures themselves that narrate the ever-changing stories of their seemingly unchanging exteriors.
The performance project was initiated as a research project. The examination is based on a two-week engagement in which historical artefacts, tools, and narratives of the cast collection Berlin are critically questioned with the participants' own bodies. The result is a collectively developed choreography that foregrounds questions about the production and reproduction of images and stories, and thus of his(her)story.Project: Dominik Bais, Camera: Justin Urbach, Assistant Director: Henriette Hufgard
The performance is based on the idea of activating historical materials from the archive of the Academy of Fine Arts Munich. The intuitive approach to the objects and images using the body and the possibilities of contemporary dance enables a contemporary interpretation of the documents. The aim is to build a bridge to the past, while also revealing a field of tension between the interpretation that emerges during the performance and the historical significance of the objects. In doing so, history is understood as fluid and ever-changing.
Gazing Beyond a Floor
2022
Installation at Galerie der Künstler:innen, Munich
The exhibition rooms of the Artists' Gallery have a floor made of Solnhofen slab limestone. This dense stone, which is cream-, ochre- and yellow-coloured, appears brownish, greyish or reddish in places. Due to the stone's biogenic origin, fossils of deposited organisms can be found in its grain, testifying to the formerly tropical, shallow sea in today's southern Germany. The slabs seen in the installation were originally used as floor tiles, skirting boards or stair treads, and were processed into printable lithographic stones through specific grinding. This flat printing technique is based on the stone's special ability to absorb grease and water in equal measure, a potential which underlies the entire exhibition floor. Due to the printing principle, mirrored word formations of the French philosopher duo Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari can be seen on some of the reworked stones. They found new creations based on the context of the plates on display, as well as their own. In their eco-social theory of production, Deleuze and Guattari developed a critique of the traditional notion of the subject, which they believed to be inseparable from relations of domination and central to contemporary theories of new materialisms. Among other things, the present could only be receptive to future events in the idea of continuous becoming. As lithographic stones, the stones in the installation symbolise the artistic process, emphasising a becoming inherent in the plates even before the organisms of the Jurassic Sea were sedimented.
Two casts of Roman statues have been in the collection of the Academy of Fine Arts Munich for over 200 years and bear the marks of iconoclastic assaults. In their fragile state, they vividly demonstrate the twists and turns of history. For the performance, the two larger-than-life plaster figures were transported from the basement of the Academy to Colossus Hall, a room specially designed for staging a colossus. With its representative apse, the room becomes a stage on which the sculptures' agency is questioned through a play of exaltation and irony.
The title of the performance Moving Monuments has a double meaning: it refers to the influence of these works of art on their recipients, which can be both positive and negative. These feelings are evoked through mechanisms that were consciously created within the works of art. With the help of their bodies, five contemporary dancers explored two plaster casts through movement sequences involving mirroring, repetition and changes of perspective, in order to break free from and undermine these mechanisms. In constantly changing formations, the sculptures are choreographically arranged by the performers in relation to the space, interacting with visitors in ever-new ways. The mobility of the sculptures is intended to encourage new ways of viewing historical artefacts and monuments, and to highlight common modes of representing political and educational relations.Project: Dominik Bais, Camera: Justin Urbach and Lili Pongratz, Editing: Florian Duffe, Performers: Elke Haldmaier, Clara Hilscher, Morgan Lespagne, Sofia Pomeroy Fernandez, Emmanuelle Rizzo
Architecture is the spatial embodiment of society, granting people scope and pre-structuring their actions. It represents social claims to power and constitutes world and self-attitudes. The architectural form is a medium for social ideas, and is thus the visible, tangible image of social structures. It is a symbiosis because, just as social factors determine architectural structures, the latter in turn influence the former. The installation Wo Ist Der Haken? addresses questions about the representation of architecture, its impact on society, and the interaction between ideology and aesthetics, using the example of the Haus der Kunst in Munich. For this, building materials from the National Socialist propaganda building were salvaged from the museum's air-raid shelter and subjected to the strictly symmetrical grid and order of the Neoclassical building.
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InfoDominik Bais (*1992 in Ulm, Germany) is a Munich based curator and author working in the field of contemporary art. From 2012 to 2018, he studied art education at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts at the class of Prof. Matthias Wähner and graduated with the award for best exhibition. From 2016 to 2021, Bais studied time-based media under Prof. Julian Rosefeldt and graduated as 'Meisterschüler' with a diploma and the academy's award. In 2023, Bais received his doctorate from Prof. Florian Matzner and Prof. Ursula Ströbele at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts for his research on questions of matter, infrastructure and production with a focus to theories of New Materialism and based on the work of the German sculptor Alf Lechner.Dominik Bais has been director of the Lechner Museum in Ingolstadt since 2023.
Exhibitions (selection)
2025 · Matter of Perspective, Lechner Museum Ingolstadt (curated)
2025 · Alf Lechner: Materie Stahl, Lechner Museum Ingolstadt (curated)
2024 · A Community of Bodies, Lothringer13 Halle, Munich
2024 · rethymno Festival, Kreta GR
2024 · Lisa Seebach: Earthy Liquids and Heavy Metal [Hypersleep], Lechner Museum Ingolstadt (curated)
2023 · b3 Festival of moving Image, Frankfurt am Main
2023 · Bamberger Kurzfilmtage
2023 · Video Art Miden, Kalamata/ Thessaloniki GR
2023 · Marco Stanke: Teil's Teil's, Lechner Museum Ingolstadt (curated)
2022 · Rencontres International, Louvre Museum Paris
2022 · Rencontres International, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin
2022 · On Art Filmfestival, Warschau, PL
2022 · Reconstructions, Bethanien, Berlin
2022 · lassitude, Goethe-Institut Paris
2022 · moving monuments, International Short Film Week Regensburg
2022 · re:working archives, Platform Munich
2021 · Künstliche Paradiese, Kunstverein Leipzig
2021 · kata komb, Haus der Kunst, Munich
2021 · Masters Printmaking, Royal Society for Encouragement of Fine Arts, Antwerp
2021 · 4. Biennale für Videokunst ‚Videodox‘, BBK München
2020 · Phanias, Biberacher Filmfestspiele, Traumpalast Biberach
2019 · Debütanten 2019, Haus der Kunst, Munich
2017 · Switch.to.art, Brückenhaus, Neu-Ulm
2017 · Help?, KMMN Kulturbahnhof, Kassel (curated)
2016 · Karl & Faber Preis, Auktionshaus Karl und Faber, München
2015 · Müncher Bank Medienkunstpreis, München
2014 · Survival Kit, Lothringer13, München
2013 · S*kit, Athens School of Arts, Athen
Awards (selection)
2023 · NEUSTARTplus-Stipendium, Stiftung Kunstfond, Bonn
2023 · Studio scholarship from the Bavarian State Ministry
2021 · Award for the Diploma of the Academy of Fine Arts Munich
2021 · Scholarship of the State of Bavaria 'Junge Kunst und Neue Wege'
2020 · 'Meisterschüler' of Julian Rosefeldt
2018 · Award for the State examination
2017 · Award of the Academy Association
2016 · Shortlist Karl & Faber Art Award 2016
2016 · ‚Junge Kunst in Bayern 2017‘, LfA Förderbank Bayern
2016 · Award of the Academy Association
2016 · Artist Residency Herzliya, Tel Aviv
2015 · Media Art Award of the Bank of Munich
2013/2014 · Residency, Athens School of Fine Arts, Athen und Delphi
2013/2014 · DAAD-Program S*kit“
2010 · Kepler Art Award, Ulm