MUNICH.- Kitty Kraus’s exhibition at Kunstverein M黱chen is dedicated to a single new work: a path that seems to have no end. A mirror, lit from behind, casts a long black shadow across the floor. For that shadow to resolve into a perfectly straight line, and for the line to continue as a path, the light has to behave in a way that artificial light normally does not.

Sunlight can achieve this effortlessly, its rays reaching the earth in near-parallel lines. A lamp has no such distance to work with: positioned close to what it illuminates, the rays fan out from a single point so that, instead of running straight, the shadow cast diverges. Kraus works against this condition using a tightly focused light source of almost blinding intensity and an arrangement of mirrors. The light is bent and redirected, coaxing artificial light to behave like sunlight. What results is elementary: a long, straight black line across the floor.

But the line does not end where the shadow ends. It continues inside the mirror, in its own reflection, appearing to continue far beyond its actual length. What reads as a single uninterrupted form therefore exists in two different states: partly as a shadow on the floor, partly as its reflection in the mirror. Neither has substance, yet together they give the line its apparent continuity. It is entirely there, yet at the same time much of what we see is not. What begins as an optical problem becomes a question of presence: how something immaterial can acquire the precision and insistence of an object.

Kraus often places minimal means under extreme physical tension. In other works, materials are pushed to the point where they are about to burst, melt, hit, crack, or break apart, held at the threshold between one state and another. Yet these transformations never become spectacle; they remain bound to the properties, pressures, and limits of the materials themselves. In this new work, that boundary is held exactly in place, always close to slipping out of alignment.

Kraus’s economy of minimal means is pushed to its limit here. Light, a mirror, a shadow: the work is reduced to these elements that are at once physically exact, yet difficult to locate as things. Light passes through space; a mirror holds what is elsewhere; a shadow has no substance yet registers with the exactitude of a drawn line. Kraus brings these conditions into deft relation, so that the apparently simple arrangement begins to slip between presence and image, between what is physically there and what only seems to be.





The exhibition is realized in collaboration with Simian, Copenhagen.

George Tourkovasilis
a Daybed presentation by Julie Peeters
September 26–November 29, 2026

Daybed begins with a piece of furniture. At home, graphic designer Julie Peeters uses a daybed as a surface for arranging documents and printed matter, for sitting, and for gathering around what has been laid out. She takes this way of working as the starting point for a recurring format that can continually change its shape and use. At Kunstverein M黱chen, the daybed becomes a larger modular structure: in its extended form, a generous surface; taken apart, a set of platforms for exhibitions, performances, screenings, readings and conversations. Its configuration changes according to what it is asked to host, allowing the structure to move with the purpose of each presentation.

The first episode of Daybed extends from George Tourkovasilis: Strange Switch. Spent. The Night, Sleep (BILL, 2025), a publication devoted to the Greek photographer and writer George Tourkovasilis (1944–2021) that Peeters recently co-edited with Maya Tounta and Helena Papadopoulos. Tourkovasilis photographed the people and situations that surrounded him: friends and lovers, models, actors, musicians and performers, as well as the streets, television screens, and cultural scenes he moved through. Portraiture, reportage, and everyday observation continually rub up against another in his work. In 1984, he published The Rock Diaries, combining photographs with an oral history of the rock, punk, and new wave subcultures in Athens. Across his practice, he remained attentive to the fleeting moments in which a face, a gesture, or an encounter suddenly assumes the clarity of an image.

This presentation is an occasion to return to the publication’s source material and look beyond what entered the book. At the center of the presentation is a group of contact sheets, shown here for the first time. They move across different periods and subjects in Tourkovasilis’s work, from nude studies and portraits to television, theatre, and moments when he himself enters the frame. Usually kept as undisclosed material—a space of sequence, repetition, selection, and omission—the contact sheet reveals what a single published photograph excludes. Here we can follow how the photographer approaches a subject and continues looking; how an image is not simply taken, but gradually found.

Daybed was first developed in 2021 for MACRO, Rome, in collaboration with Luca Lo Pinto, and is continued at Kunstverein M黱chen in a new edition. The structure is designed by Alice Babini.

Daybed is realized with the generous support of Flanders State of the Art. The presentation of George Tourkovasilis is realized in collaboration with the Estate of George Tourkovasilis, represented by Akwa Ibom, Melas Martinos, and Radio Ath鑞es, all based in Athens.

Bianca Stone: Theory
presented in the Schaufenster by Jason Dodge / Fivehundred Places, translated by Thomas Eggerer
September 26–November 29, 2026

The Schaufenster presents Theory by the American poet Bianca Stone, alongside a German translation by the artist Thomas Eggerer. Stone’s contribution is the third installment in the Schaufenster series, developed in collaboration with Jason Dodge and his poetry imprint fivehundredplaces. The series presents poems from existing and forthcoming 500Places publications as temporary public installations, with each poem translated into German by an artist. The poem appears as scrolling LED text in a window of Kunstverein M黱chen and can be read day and night from the Hofgarten and the surrounding arcades.

Curated by Tom Engels.