With Elisabeth von Samsonow, the Heidi Horten Collection is dedicating a major solo exhibition to an artistic and philosophical perspective that transcends narrow disciplinary boundaries. This is the first time that Elisabeth von Samsonow’s multifaceted body of work has been presented on this scale, showcasing its artistic breadth and intellectual depth.

The exhibition is conceived as a powerful, narrative-rich solo show—a dynamic journey that incorporates early works as well as recent series. Sculptures, paintings, drawings, films, and a site-specific installation bring to life an astonishing body of work characterized by performative thinking, formal diversity, and an interdisciplinary approach.

At the heart of Samsonow’s artistic practice lies an intensive engagement with the earth as the bearer of history, life, energy, and collective memory. Her works take up motifs from cultural history and translate them into a contemporary formal language. Movement—both physical and psychological—is a central element here: Samsonow’s work poetically and playfully transcends the boundaries drawn by rational orders and opens up spaces between art, philosophy, anthropology, and political thought.

Sculptural installations and series of images play a special role; they revolve narratively around the Gaia myth and explore fundamental questions of origin, the body, birth, value, and transformation. Many of her wooden sculptures are crafted from entire tree trunks, including works made from a thousand-year-old linden tree, whose materiality makes growth and time immediately tangible.

Samsonow’s visual worlds appeal to the collective unconscious, specifically where it intersects with nature. They draw on fragments of dreams and experimental patterns of perception that lie somewhere between diagrams and archetypal forms, inviting viewers to reconsider and reinterpret familiar images. Her works open up spaces of possibility for alternative interpretations of history, physicality, and community.

The exhibition also makes deliberate connections to the Heidi Horten Collection. Works by Egon Schiele and German Expressionists are integrated and placed in relation to Samsonow’s long-standing scholarly and artistic engagement with these movements. A specially designed area for creative activities by young and adult visitors is planned as an integral part of the exhibition and underscores the open, dialogic nature of the presentation.

A catalog will be published to accompany the exhibition.
Curated by: Rolf H. Johannsen and Hana O. O. Haas

Playing—that's one of the best things there is.

Marcel Duchamp¹

The exhibition Play Date explores the connections between art and play and examines the various forms that playfulness can take in artistic works. Playful strategies—such as working with rules and experimental setups, as well as experimentation, rule-breaking, and chance—emerge as essential aspects of 20th- and 21st-century art.

Play Date allows visitors to experience play within the interplay of idea and variation, action and interaction, as well as free and competitive play. While artistic explorations of chess, ball games, card games, and dice games engage with and subvert the mechanics and logic of these classic game forms, instructions for action and participatory installations invite visitors to become part of the art themselves. Another focal point of the exhibition is performative role-playing, in which artists explore alternative forms of the self.

_{¹Alfred Kreymborg: „Why Marcel Duchamp Calls Hash a Picture“, in: Boston Evening Transcript, 19.9.1915, zit. n. Serge Stauffer: Marcel Duchamp. Interviews und Statements, Ostfildern-Ruit, 1992, S. 13.}

As a shared activity and experience, play—far beyond childhood—is a central social practice. In addition to its potential for shared enjoyment, the exhibition also highlights the conditions of participation and exclusion. It does not ask about winners and losers, but rather about the prerequisites of play: Who is allowed to play, and by whose rules is the game played? The exhibition views play as a communal process in which new forms of interaction and participation can be explored. Play Date opens up spaces for play in two senses—as an artistic practice as well as a field of social possibilities.

Featuring works from the Heidi Horten Collection as well as international loans by Eleanor Antin, Rasheed Araeen, John M. Armleder, John Baldessari, André Breton, Alexander Calder, Lygia Clark, Céline Condorelli, Marcel Duchamp, Fischli/Weiss, Eva Grubinger, Keith Haring, Benjamin Hirte, Carsten Höller, Anna Jermolaewa, Matthias Krinzinger, Palle Nielsen, Yoko Ono, Maruša Sagadin, Takako Saito, Cindy Sherman, Philipp Timischl, Sofie Thorsen, Kay Walkowiak, Andy Warhol, Erwin Wurm, and others.

A catalog will be published to accompany the exhibition.

Curated by Véronique Abpurg.