Kunsthaus Bregenz is planning a joint exhibition in cooperation with the Maria Lassnig Foundation in Vienna and the Nairobi Contemporary Art Institute (NCAI). The NCAI was founded in 2020 by the British-Kenyan artist Michael Armitage, with whom the KUB audience is already familiar through his impressive exhibition in summer 2023.
In summer 2025, works by Michael Armitage himself, the Austrian painter Maria Lassnig, and the Kenyan wood sculptor Chelenge Van Rampelberg will be juxtaposed in the KUB foyer. The ground floor of Kunsthaus Bregenz has already proven to be an independent exhibition space on several occasions, most recently in 2023 with the exhibition KUB Collection — Anna Jermolaewa, which ran concurrently with the exhibition Michael Armitage on the upper floors. Lassnig’s and Van Rampelberg’s works presented in 2025 will be personally selected by Armitage. The idea for this special project arose from a conversation between KUB director Thomas D. Trummer and the artist, in which Armitage mentioned that Lassnig was one of the most important painters for him. The Lassnig Foundation in Vienna holds the most important collection of works by the late Austrian artist, and a large selection of her drawings will form the basis of the KUB exhibition.
Although the works of Lassnig, Van Rampelberg, and Armitage were created on different continents, they share an interest in investigating the human body. In empathetic depictions, all three artists explore human conditions and experiences, albeit from different perspectives and socializations and with differing intentions. Van Rampelberg (b. 1961) translates these themes into slender wooden sculptures and woodcuts, while Michael Armitage’s (b. 1984) watercolors address the effects of human experiences on the body and the mind. The works display fragility and vulnerability, such as in their sensitive portrayal of people on the margins of society. Maria Lassnig (1919—2014), on the other hand, focuses on her own body and experiences as a woman. Her drawings emerge from an intense self-awareness, in which the position of her body in space and the tension between closeness and alienation are crucial. For all three artists, humanity is a question of the gaze, the artistic inversion of physicality, and visual empathy. In the work of Van Rampelberg, the relationship between people is paramount; in Armitage’s images, the focus is on the representation of a gaze that cannot be reciprocated; and in Lassnig’s drawings, the view is from the perspective of her own body.
At Kunsthaus Bregenz, these different perspectives come together and interweave with one another as they do in the images themselves. Curated by Michael Armitage, the exhibition will be on view for the first time in Bregenz during the summer of 2025 and is expected to travel to the NCAI Nairobi the following year.
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