MUNICH.- Now that work on Museum Villa Stuck’s second phase of comprehensive technical renovation has been completed, the fully refurbished artist’s residence and its new cafe will open on May 14, 2026—in perfect timing for the VARIOUS OTHERS art festival. All areas of the museum are once again accessible and sport a fresh new look. To mark its reopening, Museum Villa Stuck is presenting a diverse exhibition program.

Franz von Stuck: Portrait of a Lady à la Japonaise
May 14 to September 20, 2026
Curated by Margot Th. Brandlhuber

The Museum Villa Stuck is delighted to announce a significant new acquisition: The foundation Verein zur Förderung der Stiftung Villa Stuck e. V. has given the museum a previously unknown painting by Franz von Stuck titled Portrait of a Lady à la Japonaise. The work comes from the collection of Stuck’s student Max Ackermann and now returns to the place where it was created. This not only closes a gap in the collections but, in light of current research, also offers a new perspective on the world of the Symbolist Franz von Stuck.

In the connecting building between the Old and New Studios, the exhibition features, alongside the Portrait of a Lady à la Japonaise, a portrait photograph of an unknown model taken by Franz or Mary von Stuck in their own photography studio, as well as a view of the Old Studio at Villa Stuck in circa 1900, in which the painting is shown on an easel as if in a showroom. Also on display are photographs of Mary von Stuck and Lydia Feez in kimonos as preliminary studies for other, previously unknown paintings; a women’s kimono from Franz von Stuck’s studio; photographs of the dining room at Villa Stuck featuring Asian art; as well as Franz von Lenbach’s studio photograph and Konrad Dreher’s pastel portrait of him as Ko-Ko in The Mikado (1889).

Philipp Messner: Field
May 14 to September 20, 2026
Curated by Nina Oswald and Michael Buhrs
An exhibition by the Munich City Hall Gallery at the Museum Villa Stuck

Philipp Messner developed his works for the New Studio at the Museum Villa Stuck, taking space and its materiality as his starting point: on display are ephemeral chalk lines, marble slabs soaked in paint, shimmering aluminum panels, organically meandering silvery tubes, and matte black magnetic objects. The points of reference and sources the artist draws his inspiration from are as heterogeneous as his selection of materials and forms, ranging from the phenomenology of his native region, the Dolomites to the substantive and formal concepts of the Arte Povera movement, which emphasized the subjective perception of material and space and the energy associated with them.

Messner’s sculptures are created in a field of tension between paradoxical conceptual ideas and respond to the architecture of the New Studio at Villa Stuck. On the ground floor, a chalk drawing across the entire floor marks out a field; anyone entering the space becomes part of the installation. On the upper floor, visitors are greeted by an architectural sculpture: a house—in which interior and exterior dissolve into one another—within the home of the “artist-prince” Franz von Stuck. The tension the artist creates with his works unfolds along the notion of two opposing poles: the expansion of the inner world and the retreat of the outer world.

Ilit Azoulay: No Single View
May 14 to October 18, 2026
Curated by Dr. Helena Pereña

The exhibition No Single View features new works by Ilit Azoulay, which emerged from a two-year exploration of Villa Stuck and its history. During the museum’s renovation, Azoulay developed two interrelated exhibitions: With Stopover (2024/25), she focused her attention on the temporary quarters at 54 Goethestrasse, which served as forced accommodation for Jewish families during the Nazi era; with No Single View this research extends into the Villa itself.

At the center is the two-channel installation Mary: Using the voices of seventy-seven actresses, it unfolds a multi-layered portrait of Franz von Stuck’s daughter—yet the historical Mary is merely the starting point. Taking her as her guide, Azoulay embarks on an artistic investigation that shifts the focus from the family biography to the margins of the house, where history has settled. The result is a photographic archive that functions not as a closed memory, but as an open structure of possible narratives—plural, subjective, and continually reconstructible.

Delschad Numan Khorschid and Jan-Hendrik Pelz: Ten Lives
May 14 to November 8, 2026
Curated by Anne Marr

Flight, trauma, and longing are the central themes of the exhibition Ten Lives. While migration is all too often reduced in current political debates to numbers, quotas, and demands for rejection and restriction, this exhibition opens up a space for empathy, understanding, and a call for humanity.

In the paintings, photographs, and texts on view in the exhibition, Delschad Numan Khorschid visualizes his memories of the traumatic flight from Iraq, while Jan-Hendrik Pelz lends a powerful artistic voice to migrant life stories. Art serves here as a universal, powerful, and empowering language for what seems impossible to articulate, making visible what eludes rational description. Khorschid’s personal, painful experiences are immediately present in his works. As a survivor, he recounts his flight in a compelling, moving, and unsettling manner. Pelz, on the other hand, acts as a sensitive chronicler, bearing witness to a dark chapter in European migration policy. Against this backdrop, the complexity of individual fates unfolds—a complexity that all too often remains hidden behind dehumanizing formulas in public discourse.