With the exhibition Kathrin Sonntag and Gabriele Münter – The Travelling Eye, the Museum Marta Herford is showing the previously little-known photographs of the Expressionist Gabriele Münter for the first time in Herford, the native city of her family. The contemporary artist Kathrin Sonntag was invited to engage her own works in a dialogue with works made a good hundred years earlier by Münter, who was also born in Berlin. An installation developed especially for the Lippold-Galerie will present 51 photographs that Münter took around 1900 and 43 corresponding works by Sonntag. In this juxtaposition with Gabriele Münter, the artist Kathrin Sonntag is ultimately calling into question the essence of photography as a medium and the understanding of the image we all share.
In the central installation, The Travelling Eye – Echoes (2024), the contemporary artist Kathrin Sonntag (b. 1981 in Berlin) presents photographs that Münter (b. 1877 in Berlin, d. 1962 in Murnau) took on a trip through the USA from 1898 to 1900 along with photographs from her own archive. By exploring Münter’s photo archive, Kathrin Sonntag questions her own approach to the medium and the circumstances under which photographs are taken. Juxtaposing and comparing images and objects is a fundamental principle of Sonntag’s artistic practice. She studies the mechanisms of visual perception and humorously addresses nothing less than vision as such.
The exhibition The Travelling Eye will be shown at the Kunstmuseum Ravensburg from November 2025 onwards. A jointly produced artists’ book will be published by Spector Books.