Opening of the exhibition FELD by Philipp Messner.

Rathausgalerie hosted by Villa Stuck
Prinzregentenstr. 60, 81675 Munich

In his work, artist Philipp Messner explores questions of perception: Where are the boundaries between art and nature? How do impressions of artificiality or naturalness arise? How do digital experiences alter the relationship between object, viewer, and space? And how does this transformation shape our analog reality? Messner arranges his installations into a multifaceted journey through which exhibition visitors move.

Philipp Messner developed his installations for the studio wing of the Museum Villa Stuck, taking the space and its materiality as his starting point: He works with a wide variety of materials—shimmering aluminum panels, ephemeral chalk lines, organically meandering silvery tubes, marble slabs soaked in paint, and matte black magnetic objects. His inspiration is drawn from a wide variety of sources, such as Arte Povera, or his native region, the Dolomites.

His sculptures emerge from a tension between paradoxical conceptual ideas and respond to the architecture of the Villa Stuck studio building, particularly the installation on the upper floor: an architectural sculpture within Franz von Stuck’s artist’s villa. A chalk drawing on the floor marks a field, and anyone who enters the room becomes part of the installation.

“FELD” (field) as the exhibition title also refers to a term in physics as well as other scientific disciplines such as sociology and philosophy. In the broadest sense, it refers to the spatial distribution of objects or particles within a dynamic structure of forces and positions. In this context, the artist explores the expansion of the inner world and the retreat of the outer world, creating a field of simultaneity and presence.

The Rathausgalerie presents this solo exhibition by Philipp Messner in cooperation with the Museum Villa Stuck. (The Rathausgalerie will be unavailable in 2026 due to renovation work.)

Curated by Nina Oswald and Michael Buhrs

The event will be translated in German Sign Language.