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Galerie Elisabeth & Klaus Thoman
curated by Monika Bayer-Wermuth
Dr. Monika Bayer-Wermuth ist leitende Kuratorin am Museum Brandhorst in München, wo sie die Sammlung sowie internationale Ausstellungs- und Publikationsprojekte verantwortet. Im Mittelpunkt ihrer kuratorischen Arbeit steht die tiefgehende Auseinandersetzung mit künstlerischer Produktion sowie gesellschaftliche und politische Fragestellungen der Gegenwartskunst, die sie zugänglich und kritisch in den institutionellen Kontext zu übersetzen versucht. Zu ihren Ausstellungen zählen unter anderem „Alexandra Bircken. A–Z“, „Nicole Eisenman. What Happened“ und zuletzt „This Is Me, This Is You. Die Eva Felten Fotosammlung“. Derzeit arbeitet sie an einer großen Neupräsentation der Sammlung. Vor dem Museum Brandhorst war sie an der Tate Modern in London (2016–2019) sowie am Lenbachhaus in München (2014–2016) tätig. Ihre Dissertation „Harun Farocki: Arbeit“ erschien 2017 im Verlag Silke Schreiber. Sie gehört dem Beirat des Kunstraums München an.
KAYA collaboratively traverse the boundaries between painting and sculpture, fusing both genres into an altogether new, hybrid artistic approach. Containers for a kind of inter-subjectivity that both retains and sublimates the artists’ individual hands, the works also offer a geologic logic, an organic history of their own making, as they preserve and pulverize or retool the former KAYA performance objects and ephemera into upcoming works, and re-use from KAYA’s past into a multiple, ever-becoming body. More recently, KAYA has moved beyond the figure of Kaya Serene and has become a collaborative platform that reaches beyond the artistic output of “Brätsch and Eilers” to incorporate the creative energies of the community that it builds around itself for each iteration of the project. Often times, this includes fellow artists, as well as students, curators, academics, and the institution that plays host to the many KAYA projects.
KAYA is acting as a fictional and concrete body, conjoin formal, painterly, and metabolic procedures in their productions of identity. KAYA is a collaborative project established by painter Kerstin Brätsch (b. 1979, Hamburg, Germany) and sculptor Debo Eilers (b. 1974, Texas, USA) in 2010. They both live and work in New York City. Recent solo and group exhibitions include Marta Herford, Germany (2024); Museum Brandhorst, Munich, Germany (2023); Antenna Space, Shanghai, China (2023); Haus der Kunst, Munich, Germany (2018); Whitney Biennial, New York, USA (2017); Mumok Vienna, Austria (2016); KUB Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria (2015); MWoods, Beijing, China (2015); 47 Canal, New York, USA (2013); Fridericianum, Kassel, Germany (2013).
Painting lies at the core of Maria VMier’s practice, evolving from writing gestures, from an intricate and idiosyncratic mark-making, to complex formations that seem to be constantly in motion. For MVM, painting is less a place of reification or expression, but a practice of research, experience and (un)learning. Maria VMier’s multidisciplinary practice encompasses context-specific and community-building work, as well as installations, artist books and objects. Central to their work is the notion of the body as a tool of knowledge, a site of political struggle and joy. Recurring themes are the conditions of artistic work, the dynamics of power and desire, institutions as malleable structures, nature, the invisible and the unknown.
Maria VMier (b. 1985 in Passau, Germany) studied painting and sculpture at Bard College New York, the Munich Academy of Fine Arts and the Academy of Applied Arts in Vienna. They’ve had prominent presentations at MoMA PS1, Museum Brandhorst, and the Pinakothek der Moderne (all 2024), among others. Their practice is grounded in community and collaboration: they regularly invite further artists into their work, they run the artists’ book publisher Hammann von Mier-Verlag with Stefanie Hammann, and are also part of the collective Ruine München with Leo Heinik and Jan Erbelding.
Ari Pilhofer (b. 1993, Amberg, Bavaria) is a London-based interdisciplinary artist working across painting, sculpture, performance, sound, ceramics, digital modelling and text.
Their practice expands painting into a porous system that seeps into sculptures, gestures, installations, sound, and performance.
Pilhofer’s work explores how social and class-based structures shape identity and aesthetic judgment. Drawing from queer theory, Bavarian folklore, German subcultures and personal mythology, they create fragmentary forms that reject resolution.
A recurring figure called the Spider-Knight functions as a gender-resisting archetype, appearing in performance, sculpture, and image as a shifting vessel of protection and refusal.
Their processes combine analogue and digital tools: painted surfaces are scanned, distorted, and rematerialised as ceramics, sculptural objects or garments. Through this, Pilhofer activates a form of techno-magic, transforming symbols into textures, images into bodies, and digital ghosts into tangible artefacts.
Softness, repetition, and craft techniques, such as stitching, pouring, and layering, are used not for aesthetic decoration but as political gestures. Their work also reclaims occult, intuitive and so-called “irrational” knowledges (divination, mysticism, textile language) as serious modes of embodied research and resistance.
Pilhofer’s practice has been presented at Galvani Galerie (Nuremberg, GER), Kurt-Kurt (Berlin, GER), Bayerisches Staatsministerium (Munich, GER), Warehouse X1 (Boston, Massachusetts, USA), and in collaborative performances with artist Simone Körner in Nuremberg and Chicago, Illinois (USA).
They have taught workshops at the International Summer Academy in Salzburg and HFBK Hamburg, collaborating with artist Andrea Huyoff. They are part of the SOMA Summer Residency 2025 in Mexico City and are currently completing an MA in Painting at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, supported by a DAAD scholarship from 2024 to 2026.
