Future exhibition
Double exhibition: “Marianne Aue. A ZERO artist” and “Markettá Othová, Michael Biliecky and Kamala B. Richter – The world through lenses, in pixels and digital fluidity”
01.03.2026 – 24.05.2026
With two concurrent exhibitions, the Ludwig Museum is once again turning its attention to the art scene in neighboring Czechia. Following the important exhibitions on the work of Karel Malich Cosmic (2014), Milan Grygar and John Cage: Chance Operations & Intention (2017), and Prague Power Boost (2019), the new presentation focuses on the hitherto almost undiscovered work of Czech artist Marianne Aue, who worked in the immediate circle of the important ZERO artists Heinz Mack, Otto Piene, and Günther Uecker. After only ten years, she ended her artistic career for family reasons; over time, a large part of her oeuvre was destroyed. After the presentation at the Kunstmuseum Gelsenkirchen in 2024, this is the second museum exhibition to show her complete surviving work as well as numerous previously unknown drawings.
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 Kamala 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.
Both exhibitions are generously supported by the Zdenek Sklenar Foundation, Prague.
Marianne Aue „Nr. 153“, 1964. © Nachlass Marianne Aue, Foto: Galerie Panarte, Wien