Future exhibition

Markettá Othová, Michael Bielický and Kamila B. Richter – The world through lenses, in pixels and digital fluidity

01.03.2026 – 24.05.2026

With its second parallel exhibition, the Ludwig Museum once again focuses on the art scene of the neighboring Czech Republic, addressing both contemporary photographic positions and the question of how much image information should be questioned in the digital age and how much it is subject to constant change.

Marianne Aue (born in Freudenthal in 1932, died in Leverkusen in 2016), trained at the School of Applied Arts in Krefeld, was active in European avant-garde movements such as ZERO and the New Tendencies from the early 1960s onward. Her often monochromatic structural reliefs are particularly striking, combining serial principles with musical compositional structures, such as the deliberately calculated interplay of light and shadow. After her oeuvre had long been neglected, her estate was recovered and preserved a few years ago. In addition to the scholarly exploration of this unique contribution to the European post-war avant-garde, Aue’s innovative spirit and experimental approach are particularly evident here.

The second exhibition is dedicated to both photographic positions and the question of how far image information must be questioned in the digital age and how subject it is to constant change. With Marketá Othová, the Ludwig Museum presents for the first time in a German museum an artist who is extremely well-known in the Czech Republic for her laconic yet sensitive view of everyday things. Her works are mostly reduced to black and white. Continuing the tradition of Czech photography, Othová combines lyrical and conceptual approaches into a visual language that explores the possibilities of her own medium with a questioning approach. Marketá Othová once compared her photographs to words that, in combination, form sentences. For her, the arrangement of the works is a central component of her artistic practice.

In the paintings of Kamila B. Richter and the digital works of Michael Bielický, everything revolves around the question of pictorial reality. While Richter still paints in the traditional oil style, she uses pixelated, “distorted” photographs from mobile phones, screens, or video displays exclusively as her starting point. Only upon closer inspection do the motifs fragmentarily reassemble. Her focus is on today’s mediatized reality, machine vision—the representation of what remains hidden from the human eye. For Richter, the limited, phase-based image of blurred videos thus becomes the actual representation of reality. This alienated, mediatized reality as pictorial content, and the traditional oil painting technique she employs in weeks of layering, make the tensions of contemporary visual culture visible and tangible. With her partner, Michael Bielický, she sometimes turns entirely to the digital world.

Bielický, who has lived in Germany since 1969 and studied Fine Arts at the Düsseldorf Art Academy under Nam June Paik, founded the first New Media Studio at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague in 1991. Since 2006, he has held the Chair of Media Art at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design (formerly the ZKM). Bielický is one of the first artists in Europe and the Czech Republic to have explored electronic and digital technologies. His work primarily deals with themes and tools of communication, navigation, and video and VR technologies, and in recent years also with web-based information in public spaces. His work has often been created in collaboration with the ZKM in Karlsruhe and has been presented at the Ars Electronica Festival as well as in art museums such as the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the MoMA in New York. He will present a new work for the Ludwig Museum.

Both exhibitions are generously supported by the Zdenek Sklenar Foundation, Prague.