Lenbachhaus - Kunstbau at Königsplatz in Munich
Special exhibition - the sound of art: Sound and Experiment X at Lenbachhaus Kunstbau - Can you hear art? Let's find out ...
December 2, 2025 – December 7, 2025 - Admission free! Tue–Sun 10 am–6 pm, Thu 6 pm–midnight (Deutsch)
Munich In early December, you can hear art at the Kunstbau in Munich's Königsplatz! Can you hear art? Let's find out and see what the students of the Munich Academy of Fine Arts have created: ... For the first week of December, Dan Flavin's "untitled (for Ksenija)" (1994) will give way to site-specific works of acoustic art by students in the "Sound and Experiment" program led by Florian Hecker (Bayerisches Spitzenprofessurenprogramm—Academy of Fine Arts Munich). Once the illumination of Flavin's installation ceases, the works assert themselves in the space as an audible, physical presence. The interplay between direct sound and multilayered reflections and resonances creates a scene of temporal experiences that heighten the visitors' sensory perception of the space as well as their self-perception.
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| Königsplatz with Propyläen in Munich, photo: Helga Waess (Pressefotoarchiv) |
The exhibition at the Kunstbau presents newly produced multichannel sound pieces
by Sofian Biazzi, focus baby, Daniel Gianfranceschi, Bruno Younes Haas, Jahy Hwang, Caroline Kretschmer, Bradley Leonard, Léa Manoussakis di-Bona, Maria Margolina, Camilla Metelka, and Vasilii Vikhliaev.
A CD featuring selected works by the participating artists will be released in spring 2026.
Divided by eighteen pillars into two naves, the Kunstbau features an access ramp and a rotunda with a staircase in the rear;
apart from a few minor modifications, it has retained the original shape laid out by the engineers who planned the structure. The room has an elongated gently curved ground plan with about 17,100 square feet of floorspace and a clear height of 17.4 feet, resulting for an effective acoustic volume of around 290,000 cubic feet.
The hard surfaces of the Kunstbau offer minimal absorption of sound. The physical materials, the large overall volume, and the nearly parallel surfaces—which focus and reflect sound waves—reinforce the space’s distinctive acoustic characteristics. Sound can propagate freely, resulting in a prolonged reverberation time and complex acoustic textures.
Two line-array speaker systems
— developed specifically for this project in close consultation with Meyer Sound, one of the world’s leading manufacturers of cutting-edge loudspeaker systems—are installed in the Kunstbau’s northern and southern corners. Each system comprises three sub-bass speakers and four additional line-array speakers, which—unlike in conventional setups— receive discrete audio signals while also functioning as an ensemble. Seemingly monolithic, the speaker arrays in the room thus operate as polyphonic ensembles, reproducing signals across the entire audible frequency range with exceptional phase coherence and extremely low distortion—even at concert-level volumes.
The interplay between the Kunstbau's unique architecture, its inherent acoustics,
and the one-of-a-kind speaker system provides the framework for eleven newly commissioned sound pieces by the participating artists from the "Sound and Experiment" program. Beyond addressing the context in which Flavin's works are situated within the complex field of twentieth-century minimalism and material reduction, this inquiry serves as a point of departure for an exploration of pseudo-durational forms, iterative acoustic structures, microvariations, non-equality, pattern formation, and sounds on the edges of human perception—as well as a creative examination of spatial modes, excitation frequencies, and audible reflections as acoustic materials.
The works featured in this presentation are based on difference, repetition, and reduction, as well as process-based composition, with attention to how these factors shape listening and spatio-temporal perception. Rather than emphasizing dramatic development and dynamics, the projects will explore apparent stasis, where subtle change emerges through structural logic.
Curated by Johannes Michael Stanislaus
A collaboration with the program "Sound and Experiment" by Florian Hecker (Bayerisches Spitzenprofessurenprogramm — Academy of Fine Arts Munich).
With generous support from
- Förderverein Lenbachhaus e.V., the Society of the Friends of the Lenbachhaus
Sound_and_Experiment_X_Lenbachhaus_Kunstbau
- December 2, 2025 – December 7, 2025
- Admission free!
- Tue–Sun 10 am–6 pm
- Thu 6 pm–midnight
