Overture

Graduate Show: Juli 16 – August 10, 2025
Städel Museum, Schaumainkai 63, 60596 Frankfurt am Main

With works by Mariia Andreeva, Charlotte Berg, Linus Berg, Sam Cottington, Arnaud Ferron, Samuel Georgy, Tomás Loureiro Gonçalo, Anima Goyal, Giulia Guidi, Aerin Hong, Gašper Kunšič, Gregor Lau, raúl itamar lima, Salome Lübke, Fuki Matsumoto, Rosa Nitzsche, Vincenzo Ottino, Deshaun Price, Emmilou Roessling, Killa Schuetze, Juri Simoncini & Elisa Diaferia, Elsa Stanyer, Nicholas Stewens, Mahmoud Tarek, Siyu Tian, Xtina Vargas, Vera Varlamova, Punch Viratmalee and Ming Yuan.

Mariia Andreeva

Order of Appearance

A series of casein prints; a photographic technique of layering colour pigments using separate negatives. Each colour is an exposure of a small area inside a bigger picture–a view of the forest at night, in complete obscurity. Appearance of a tree in the millisecond of a flash light is a short but intense act of seeing. Yet, multiple instances of the same motif remain unsynchronised attempts, forming an image in disarray. Accumulating over time as a mnemonic constellation.

Charlotte Berg

Spine and Posture depict containers in states of deflation. Black spots are forming in their folds, growing like mold. The spots live on the surface as well as in the pictorial space.

Remembering Spine’s and Posture’s reference objects, perpetually kept in motion by the airflow rising from their feet, it becomes evident that their qualities significantly changed when they got flattened and framed. Once ceaselessly dancing for attention, now, every part of their bodies is fixed to a point on the surface. They are mapped out, measured and displayed while barely holding together. They inhabit a space that is constraining them, oh well...

This is not a question of whether to choose an animated life of endless repetition and empty gestures, but one of measurement, observation and their ensuing consequences. It is a question of painting as an observer, and in that regard, of what it means to be passive.

The reference images for the untitled paintings are a photo of a crutch and one I took of the floor in Dürerstraße 10, at night, when leaving the school from my studio.

Linus Berg

Works of cultural theory and neoliberal self-help literature are stacked on top of each other in between shaky juggling clubs and academic hats. Over the past two years, my research has focused particularly on juggling as both an accelerationist metaphor for the multitasking, precarious artist subject and a praxis for system-critical disruption. In Western history, jugglers have juggled at the carnival, the royal court, and at traffic lights; they have traveled in the circus and in our language; they have organized themselves as anti-capitalist supporters of the sexual liberation movement in the sixties and paradoxically, they have assumed big positions in powerful companies like Apple and Windows. The carnivalesque—neither subversive nor conformist—permeates past and present. It describes both the risk of giving the stage to charlatans and the opportunity to renegotiate ever-shifting relations of value and meaning. From stage magic to entrepreneurial performance, smoke and mirrors are not confined to the circus: they are essential tools for artists, grifters, melancholic hippies, tech giants, and state governments alike.

I draw from different sources not simply as a reaction to the deeply felt context collapse of our current post-post-modern culture in which a clickbait YouTube video and heavy work of theory are consumed with similar detachment. Rather than mourning old hierarchies of authority, I want to think of an economy of permission in which ideas, materials, and contexts build upon each other, developing a dialectical muscle and language. My work and writing practice are not footnotes of each other but mutually maintain one another. The work doesn’t solve my problems, but it situates them and makes them accessible.

Sam Cottington

Class of Prof. Monica Baer

Titles:
Paris, 2025
White I, 2025
White II, 2025
Suddenly my uncle came in the room I, floor installation, 2025
Suddenly my uncle came in the room II, floor installation, 2025
Dear Diary, floor installation, 2025

Elisa Diaferia & Juri Simoncini

Elisa Diaferia and Juri Simoncini are an artist duo whose practice looks into the possibilities of world-building and storytelling. Engaging dramaturgically with communication systems, they blend pop references, music theory, and cinematic functionings into speculative landscapes based on cultural assemblage. With a sculptural attitude to sound and a musical one to form, they explore how cosmologies come to be, and stories are born.

For Overture, the duo presents the 2025 works Endo and Troopers, produced for their recent solo shows À bloc (aaaa nordhavn, Copenhagen) and Troopers (fffriedrich, Frankfurt am Main). Encapsulating a fundamental tension behind their production, the works address the relation between time-based media and spatial experience. Within both, narrative potential is a frustrated impulse to reckon and play with.

With a scattered topography, Endo traces the evidence of an event, an attempt to transcribe rhythm into a physical system. As the central structure embodies the reminiscence of an arena, a stunt ramp, or an acoustic apparatus, the installation expands in the form of a carpet of imaginative debris. The title, drawn from the bike racing lingo, evokes a crash. Acting like the cloud of smoke that comes after, the work reflects on the nature of melodrama, staging a suspended scenario of action, movement, and violence.

The short movie Troopers unfolds over three colliding, yet intuitively entangled sequences. Throughout them, a principle of choreographed movement animates highly orchestrated and deceptive objects, sets, and situations. As the virtual, physical, symbolic, and arbitrary collide, the movie unravels, exposing expectations of musical and visual evolution. Ultimately, it reveals itself to be a container for literary investigation by embedding a totally autonomous short story in its fabric. The result is an associative, visual reverie that tries to complicate the viewer’s relation to text within the framework of video.

Arnaud Ferron

Gustave Le Gray (1820-1884) was a French painter and photographer. Taken during his tenure as official photographer of Napoleon III, Salute of the French fleet off Cherbourg (1858) records the naval exercises of the French and British fleets in the harbor of Cherbourg during Queen Victoria’s official state visit to France.

The picture stands as an example of combination printing, an early form of photographic manipulation used to balance different exposures. Le Gray famously printed his seascapes from two negatives on a single sheet of paper: one exposed for the sea, the other for the sky.¹

Despite its technological mastery, the photograph does not seem to anticipate the decline of the Age of Sail. The sailing ships it depicts would soon be rendered obsolete by the rise of steamboats, a shift accelerated by the construction of the Suez Canal. A month after the photograph was taken, Napoleon III launched the first phase of French colonization in Vietnam with a naval intervention known as the Siege of Tourane (now Đà Nẵng). By significantly reducing travel time, the Suez Canal became the primary maritime route for steamboats connecting France to what would later become French Indochina.

Gustave Courbet (1819-1877) is widely considered the founder of the Realist movement, which rejected Romanticism in the wake of the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution.

Fearing rising nationalism and authoritarianism under Napoleon III, Courbet temporarily left France in 1858. In a letter to his family dated December 21, 1858, he wrote: I could only write insignificant things, full of unhappiness, nothing very interesting. I ramble through foreign countries to find the independence of mind that I need and to let pass this government that does not hold me in honor, as you know. My absence has been very good.²

View of Frankfurt with the Old Bridge from Sachsenhausen (1858) was painted during Courbet’s stay in Germany, where he spent much of his time painting and hunting. Created in his Sachsenhausen studio in Frankfurt, the painting portrays a pastoral view of the Main River, excluding buildings and passersby. Ultimately, the painting does not demonstrate the principles of Realism for which Courbet is known.³

¹) Gustave Le Gray, The Great Wave, Sète, 1857, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Object Number: 1976.646. https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/261941. Accessed 27 June 2025. ²) Gustave Courbet, Letters of Gustave Courbet, edited and translated by Petra ten-Doesschate Chu. The University of Chicago Press, 1992. ³) Klaus Herding, Courbet in Frankfurt. Debatten über Malerei 1851-2011 in Christian Freigang, et al. (eds.), Das neue Frankfurt: Innovationen in der Frankfurter Kunst vom Mittelalter bis heute. Kramer, Waldemar, 2010.

Samuel Georgy

Soap Opera

It has been said that Don Durito once sat smoking a cigar, reading a book about neoliberalism, when he was visited by a dog, whom he called his “domesticated friend.” The dog indirectly asked Don Durito for a favor, explaining that he suffered from an acute noise disturbance. He framed his request by saying he needed the don’s help only because of his small size as a beetle. Enraged by this insult to his intellect, Don Durito refused at first. But his heart softened when he realized his domesticated friend was truly distressed, knowing the dog loved music and that it was his only joy in an otherwise dull life.

The dog blamed Josephine, the singing mouse, for the noise, especially after seeing her bite an unplugged cable. Skeptical, Don Durito decided to investigate. He ventured into the burrow and noticed that as he approached Josephine’s performance, her delicate scream grew clearer, even though the space was otherwise silent, packed with listening mice. He captured her singing—a fragile, messy voice on the verge of breaking—but couldn’t witness everything because the mice were linked by their tails to some kind of mixer transmitting vast data.

More confused than ever, Don Durito was leaving when he met a mole. He remembered stories from Subcomandante Marcos about how the mole feared no lion, since lions kill with their gaze. He asked if the mole had also been disturbed by noise, and the answer was yes, which saddened Durito deeply. He recalled tales of gods who could not dance to noise until they found music in their hearts, though he doubted this would help the dog or mole.

Now forced to mediate, Durito resented the role. He never wanted to judge between the dog and the mouse, yet now he had to choose. He cared for his domesticated friend, but justice had to prevail. Josephine’s noise was not the real disturbance—his own noise was.

Anima Goyal

ਗੁੱਡੀਆਂ (Gudiyaan) is a cinematic sick body that traces linguistic and bodily illnesses across borders, living beings, and objects. ਗੁੱਡੀ translates as a “doll” or a “daughter” in Punjabi. The title references the 1928 film Daughters of Today, directed by Shankradev Arya, said to be the first Punjabi silent film made in Lahore (present-day Pakistan). The original film survives through scattered administrative data; there are no fragments or descriptions. At that time, Punjab was one state. After the partition of 1947, Punjab was divided into two parts, one in India and the other in Pakistan. ਗੁੱਡੀਆਂ is a speculative reconstruction of this work, where two women from the two Punjabs walk in a nondescript forest and attempt a conversation.

The forest contains many illnesses.

The stag beetle has a hole in her body, where the parasite entered.

Her body does not have a healing mechanism.

My friend’s grandmother left her doll in Jullundur. The local map to find her previous home in the other Punjab is too old.

She rejected the new Punjab. She has tried her best to forget Punjabi.

ਗੁੱਡੀ is walking towards Lahore, to her friend, ਗੁੱਡੀ.

ਅੰਗਰੇਜ਼ੀ ਵਿੱਚ ਲਿਖਣ ਨਾਲ ਉਸਦੀ ਪੰਜਾਬੀ ਭਾਸ਼ਾ ਬਿਮਾਰ ਹੋ ਜਾਂਦੀ ਹੈ।

English makes her Punjabi sick.

ਗੁੱਡੀ refuses to recover.

Punjabi would make her Urdu sick.

وہ ترجمہ کرنا پسند نہیں کرتی

Giulia Guidi

Giulia Guidi lives and works between Frankfurt am Main and Bema, Sondrio.

She studied at the Städelschule from 2022 to 2025 in the class of Gerard Byrne.

In her practice she uses film, video, photography, drawing, and sculpture to investigate repetitions, relations, and intersections of relations between light, movement, and matter.

Aerin Hong

Untitled (Teaser) is a short film conceived as a teaser for an imagined silent film.
Seated at a Yamaha piano in his office, Wolfgang Winter improvises a piece as a motorized butterfly toy flutters across the keys. Confined to a fixed mechanical orbit, the toy mimics the flight of delicate wings. As his fingers carefully avoid stepping on the butterfly, its repetitive noise and erratic movements compose rhythm and melody

Gašper Kunšič

They come out of their shelters when the night falls. They move in mysterious ways. When they walk into a room, everything stops. They appear out of fog, out of smoke. The rhythm fills the space. They bring light even when it’s dark. They carry the light within. They carry everything they have with them—a potion for every pain, a kiss for every wound, making homes wherever the road takes them. Tattoos on their bodies mark time and resilience—monuments to ruthless hands that tried to mold them, to suppress and squeeze their magic into a living death. They almost died. Now, they look at it as their elixir; a driving force. A credo. Out of darkness, they molded their sun. A darker light in purple rain hues. They hold that—that queer joy they found and share with those on the way, protecting their spaces and bodies from massacres. They travel by night to protect themselves — even though they are invincible now. The road made them enduring, resistant markers of singing in dark times. They bring a tender touch to a ruthless landscape—and before you know it, as the music disappears, there is smoke and a scent of a faraway place. They are gone, traveled further. But the melodies, worlds, and love linger in the space forever, as they charged it—and everything shimmers that they laid their touch upon.

Gregor Lau

In my artistic practice, I set geographical and social spaces into new contexts. By making casts or reproductions of certain places and architectural structures, I develop an archive that I use as a basis for my works. In this way, both the themes and the materials of the works result from an intensive reference to the places I am interested in. The starting point for this is often political or historical events as well as social circumstances and structures.

My work for the graduate show is a continuation of a previous project. It deals with topics such as the value of labor, uncertainties about the future, and how this can be expressed in an artistic practice. Through material and form, the individual elements function as displays which approach socio-political topics in a playful, installative, and sculptural manner.

raúl itamar lima

It touches many things, language does.

Sometimes it crumbles; at other times, it runs unnoticed, and sometimes it is transcribed so it may attain another kind of continuity.

These are some excerpts from my readings (mostly from books in the school’s library); sets of language and antecedents which, for the occasion of this exhibition, are written down on Carrara marble slabs.

A conceptual nod, a verbal layout.

Tomás Loureiro Gonçalo

About mic Test and the drawings 1, 2, and 3:
I initially asked someone else to write this for me, but sadly she got sick. When she told me it was already Thursday, it was due on Sunday, and a friend was visiting me. In the end it was still important to hear the opinion of someone else on the work, so I asked if he could come up with something. He left early Sunday morning and sent me this on WhatsApp:

“I think this would be the text:

Mondrian: ‘One day the time will come when we shall be able to do without all the arts, as we know them now; beauty will have ripened into palpable reality. Humanity will not lose much by missing art.’

Think it’s good for leaving art school, plus how the work is based upon simple factors of life.

And also, how art transcends into your own life. In relation to the body of the video. (…) Yes, I think it’s quite soothing too. And hopeful in a way.”

Thanks Asger and thanks Marie for giving your time.

Salome Lübke

born 1996
Class of Prof. Monika Baer

 

Fuki Matsumoto

Roughing it out

4–3, 4–5, 6–1, 4–5, 2–5, 5–1. Six Blizzard cups later, Panthers win the Stanley Cup. No, this isn’t your trinket-dangling thermo cup; we’re talking peak sports here, the real deal! Blood, sweat, busted lips—hockey, baby. McDavid’s a magician, no doubt, but when the pressure hit, the Oilers cracked while the Cats dug in. They played like they were worried about feelings; we played like we wanted the Cup. And now? We’ve got it. Maybe there’s a place for all that soft stuff somewhere—but not here, not now. Anyway, the boys are out there hugging, crying, kissing—whatever. Cup’s ours.

 

Fuki Matsumoto, Siyu Tian

Diminuendo

Installation by Fuki Matsumoto and Siyu Tian. Text by Fuki Matsumoto.

Diminuendo reflects the collapse of the bubble economy through a chaotic visual landscape. Inverted skyscrapers sit like relics of a toppled order, while a flood of imagery—meme culture, cult films, purikura, sports, subcultures, and advertising—swirls around them in relentless overload. The work mimics the overwhelming pace of contemporary life and economic recession, where too much information melts meaning and spectacle masks decline. Drawing from the aesthetics of B-grade gloss and internet saturation, Diminuendo captures a world caught between nostalgia and burnout. It is not a quiet recession but a dazzling, disorienting descent.

Rosa Nitzsche

Spring of Affection is a musical short.

It portrays the arbitrary life of three angels in Frankfurt, moving through metro stations, a park, domestic space... Suddenly, a tailor appears and sings a song about his emotionality. The film ends at a taxi gas station.

Rosa studied the tradition of French musicals.

Her work involves using non-professional actors and real places. The camera serves a documentary function within a staged setting. The sound carries as much importance as the imagery.

The musical consists of two songs, performed by a human and a non-human being. It reflects on different forms of consciousness and what distinguishes them from one another.

Spring of Affection looks at the attempt of an objective documentation of life, whether through analog black-and-white documentary photography or through an angel‘s view and their library of thoughts.

Vincenzo Ottino

Class of Prof. Gerard Byrne

Deshaun Price

Born 1992
Class of Prof. Monika Baer

Emmilou Roessling

Emmilou Roessling (*1991, Berlin) works with sculpture, choreography and text. She studied choreography in Gießen and Amsterdam and Fine Arts at Städelschule in the class of Haegue Yang. There is no permanence–despite every attempt to maintain and archive. Menzel's Bedroom, rather than demanding the efforts of conservation, submits itself to the passage of time, like a darkening, B-rated oil painting never restored or statue left in the corner of a derelict park. Its copper oxidises, its water evaporates, the text printed on thermal paper faints and vanishes under the exposure to light. 

Printed on the paper scroll is a detailed description of Adolph Menzel's painting The Artist's Bedroom in Ritterstraße from 1847. The text will be updated and re-edited throughout the course of the exhibition; not in order to fix it in a moment of time, but rather to allow it to flow in its transient meaning before it changes. Once again!

Killa Schuetze

What meaning does a door have when it can no longer be opened? When it no longer grants access, but obstructs it? Is it a fragment, an obstacle, or simply a leftover of a system that has lost its function?

In Say Hi To Forever, Killa Schuetze works with metal doors that have been removed from their architectural context. Stripped of their original purpose, they become recontextualized surfaces, markers of transition, boundaries without function.

One door features a large subscan of a clenched fist. A gesture typically associated with resistance or agency, here it is rendered blurry and unstable. Using a subscan technique, a photograph is distorted by deep bass vibrations from a subwoofer, interrupting the scanning process. The resulting image hovers between body, noise, and machine, not as clear representation, but as interference. The metal structure is inhabited by hand-formed clay objects, made without tools in quick, intuitive gestures, fists pressed into soft material, then released. Some of these forms are broken and visibly repaired with silicone and wax, emphasizing fragility, transformation, and time. The repairs are not concealed but integrated, marking rupture without restoring wholeness. These objects recall coral, bone, or bodily fluids, referencing cycles of decay and regeneration.

The elements, some reminiscent of guardians, others more ambiguous, cling to the structure like growths. They fill cracks and edges, creating a dialogue between softness and hardness, the organic and industrial.

Rather than offering conclusions, the installation explores material and emotional states: broken versus intact, digital versus manual, constructed versus grown. It unfolds as an archive of past and recent works, a living, changing body shaped by persistence and adaptation. Say Hi To Forever becomes a study of resilience, not as perfection, but as the ongoing negotiation between vulnerability and form.

Text by Franka Marlene Schlupp

Elsa Stanyer

Detachment from intimate atmospheres and abandonment are recurring themes in Elsa Stanyer’s practice, but not as a subjective condition, but rather as a feature of our shared and interdependent lives. We are vulnerable to those social structures that make our lives possible, and when they waver, we waver too. In psychoanalytic theses, “becoming a subject” is preceded by a supposed process of detachment that thus leads to self-empowerment. Elsa Stanyer’s work explores the possibility of not simply overcoming dependencies in order to achieve self- sufficiency: Rather, these relationships marked by dependency are to be accepted as a condition for equivalent existence in order to let something grow out of it.

Text by Sophia Scherer

Nicholas Stewens

Nicholas Stewens’ practice spans painting, sculpture, and installation. His work invites tangled situations to play out, where conflicting ideologies converge: military traditions, queer theory, Christian schooling, incel subcultures, commodified punk, and other iconographic tales of our time. The result is a monstrous amalgam of ideas, where resolution seems improbable.

However, his works also aim to provide relief. Forgetfulness, depression, laziness, and other modes of being that interrupt productive rhythms are invited into object identities. Resisting their original logic, these objects embrace a more frivolous undertaking. By carving out undefined spaces in which new relations to their environment and to each other can play out, reassessment and reorientation take place. In Stewens’ graduation works, Beaches and 50.1031° N, 8.6741° E, literal orientation in space becomes key.

The diptych Beaches draws from a 360° found-footage video of a football game’s opening ceremony. Flamethrowers and fireworks light up the field, a marching band stirs the crowd, players storm the pitch. While a snowstorm swallows the scene, it does not put an end to it. The noise continues. Amid the spectacle, the frames depicted from the panoptic device reject sensationalism. Instead, they mark a simple gesture: one look down at the ground, one look up.

Mahmoud Tarek

The work begins with symbolic forms—landscapes, domestic materials, animals—familiar structures that carry inherited meaning. Through perceptual distortions, I treat these symbols not as fixed units but as placeholders within shifting systems. Their function is not to communicate directly but to register the instability of their own status.

I’m interested in what happens when “universal” symbols—like clouds or Goethe—lose their godlike status. Once relocated into museum space, they don’t just gain visibility—they start to rot. The Cloud stretches a rope, reaching down from its insides without intent, and Goethe isn’t the Enlightenment; he’s trapped in the throat of a suburban monster. These aren’t only metaphors in the literary sense but arrangements that complicate visibility.

One central image derives from a family photograph painted onto wood where the subject’s head—my own—was carved out. What remains is negative space, filled by a cartoonish monster in the background. That figure reappears not as a symbol of trauma but as a structural solution: a way to account for absence without resolving it.

The work doesn’t seek coherence. It uses familiar codes to expose the point at which they break down, or worse, begin to function too smoothly.

Siyu Tian

Polychord is a kind of chord superposition technology, which can be used to achieve the effect of polytonality. Polytonality draws upon a compositional technique that involves the simultaneous use of two or more distinct tonalities. Its expressive power lies in the contrast and resonance created through the interaction of differing tonal centers, producing a unique and layered sonic experience.

The work interweaves dynamic moments from nocturnal scenes into a single, multifaceted visual composition. It immerses viewers in a symphony of overlapping environments, evoking the sensation of being fully present within these intersecting spaces—yet always free to retreat and move at one’s own rhythm.

Xtina Vargas

Born 1997
Class of Prof. Monika Baer

 

Vera Varlamova

Vera Varlamova is false-hope narrative and an equal-opportunity dating site that feeds on itself.

Bosnian-born orphan, she migrated illegally to Switzerland at fifteen, spending her early years creating stained glass and frescoes of animal corpses in an attic studio while evading immigration authorities.

After her inevitable deportation, she relocated to the U.S. This phase is marketed as her "breakout". She arrives at Black Mountain College in its final glitch years–two semesters of utopian hallucination before the institution collapses under the weight of its own mythology. She calls this the happiest time of her life. Could be metaphor, could be from a brochure. She disappears again.

Cue New York. Cue Duchamp. She becomes his studio assistant, intimate accomplice, alleged co-author. The Bride Stripped Bare, among others, is rumored to bear her fingerprint—though no documentation survives outside whispered anecdotes and misattributed footnotes. Their friendship: unphotographable, endlessly cited. After his death, she reinvents herself in Paris. Legally, this time. She repurposes Duchamp's Rolodex to found the abcd collection: a salvage operation for so-called "outsider" and "degenerate" art. Over 2,000 works. Ongoing. Touring. A monument to the archive as survival strategy.

In Paris, she meets Elf Mikesch. They fall in love. Varlamova stars in Mikesch's cult film Seduction: The Cruel Woman, playing herself as a dominatrix playing someone else.

Shortly after their long awaited legal marriage in 2001, Varlamova leaves her new wife and Europe without a single note and this time–forever. She moves to Saïda, Algeria where she converts to Sufism under the name Bassel Mohammed, devoting her final years to poetry and prayer.

Today, the legacy of Vera Varlamova is both deeply profound and widely argued. There's no official catalogue raisonné. Her name recurs in footnotes, image captions, corrupted downloads. Part myth, part manifesto. A shape moving through formats–always halfway gone.

(Text from the catalog)

Punch Viratmalee

Alte Meister is a performance piece where the artist made use of the free access granted by her student status at the Städelschule, a condition influenced and stipulated by the special relationship between the school and the museum, both established from an endowment left by Johann Städel, a wealthy banker and patron of the arts, in his will in 1815. The artist then visited the Städel Museum repeatedly over the course of 40 days. During each visit, typically lasting around two hours in the afternoon, she observes a painting from the old master collection—Giovanni Bellini's Madonna and Child with St. John the Baptist and Elizabeth. Throughout this sustained process of looking, she documented thoughts and impressions that had surfaced in the moment. The publication, titled Alte Meister, is the culmination and at the same time—remnant of the aforementioned performance. The writings, although centered on the artist’s observation, have also expanded to incorporate the experience of the artist as a foreign body/being inside an institutional space that is rich with history and social rituals.

 

Ming Yuan

Ming Yuan (b. 1997, Chengdu) works across painting, sculpture, essay, and sound to examine how aspirational identity, particularly racialized femininity, is packaged, sentimentalized, and aestheticized into display. Her practice is informed by historical materialism and shaped by her diasporic experience navigating race, gender, and class. She approaches aesthetic systems as contested terrains where memory, ideology, and racialized economic systems are made legible.

Yuan’s tone is ornamental, minimal, and theatrical yet richly referential. Her works parody their own legibility, exposing contradictions embedded in cultural value, identity, and surface. Framing devices carry as much charge as what they enclose. Surfaces become volatile sites where seduction meets suspicion, and aesthetic congealment reveals deeper economic subtexts of value.

In the blue willow room, she promises the possibility of the real operates somewhere between boutique, shrine, and personal archive. It resembles a room hollowed of conviction but crowded with implication. The space oscillates between too empty and too full, staging a choreography of overloading display and scrutinized erasure. Suspicion and kitsch flicker briefly before they are silenced. Beauty becomes a system of control, stretched across the illusion of presence and the weight of absence, manifesting how object turns into subject in drag.

Using hand-silkscreened toile de jouy wallpapers and uncanny sculptures of yacht-varnished mahogany, Yuan unwraps her own visual logic. Amidst the immediacy of ornamental overload, suspicion unveils gradually: the true ornament of the blue willow room is the alibi of a racialized girlhood. It is implied, withheld, and displaced.

With In the blue willow room, she promises the possibility of the real, as the title suggests, she promises the possibility of the real. But the real remains suspended in decoration, sublimated by desire, and haunted by ornament’s capacity to conceal as much as it reveals.

Overture

Graduate Exhibition: 16. Juli – 10. August 2025

Städel Museum, Schaumainkai 63, 60596 Frankfurt am Main
Opening hours: Tuesday–Sunday, 10 am–6 pm; Thursday, 10am–9 pm

Opening: Tuesday, July 15, 2025, 7–10 pm

Entrance via Holbeinstraße, opposite building number 8.
With a performance program by the students.

Under the title Overture, 30 graduates present their final exhibition at the Städel Museum. After up to five years of studies in Fine Arts, the exhibition marks not (only) the end of their study time, but presents also a prelude to what is yet to come. Overture points towards the horizon of artistic practice, and the process of developing and rediscovering one’s own approach to art and its relevance, again and again.

The students’ works offer insights into current artistic discourses, and yet, they grapple with timeless themes, which they bring into their own present and world: the politics and aesthetics of everyday life; the relentless circulation of images; the fluidity of identity; affects such as desire, vulnerability and longing; the traces of history and time; the limits of language and communication; the artificiality of our relationship with nature and the conditions of production – also in relation to one’s own position. The students’ media and practices are as rich as their themes: film, video and sound meet installation and sculpture, painting and collage, as well as conceptual and performative interventions.

The artists are Mariia Andreeva, Charlotte Berg, Linus Berg, Sam Cottington, Arnaud Ferron, Samuel Georgy, Tomás Loureiro Gonçalo, Anima Goyal, Giulia Guidi, Aerin Hong, Gašper Kunšič, Gregor Lau, raúl itamar lima, Salome Lübke, Fuki Matsumoto, Rosa Nitzsche, Vincenzo Ottino, Deshaun Price, Emmilou Roessling, Killa Schuetze, Juri Simoncini & Elisa Diaferia, Elsa Stanyer, Nicholas Stewens, Mahmoud Tarek, Siyu Tian, Vera Varlamova, Xtina Vargas, Punch Viratmalee and Ming Yuan.

From the classes of Monika Baer, Gerard Byrne, Judith Hopf, Hassan Khan, Tobias Rehberger, Willem de Rooij and Haegue Yang.

Curated by Johanna Laub.

Graduate Prizes

As part of the exhibition, a jury of experts awarded prizes to the graduates for the best final projects:

Arnaud Ferron, class of Haegue Yang
Prize by the Städelschule Portikus e.V. and the Stiftung Städelschule für junge Künstler

Anima Goyal, class of Willem de Rooij
Prize by the Plastischen Chirurgie Frankfurt | Hochtaunus

Nicholas Stewens, class of Judith Hopf
Prize by the Sammlung Pohl

In addition, scholarships were awarded to the following graduates thanks to the Heinz and Gisela Friederichs Stiftung:

Elisa Diaferia & Juri Simoncini, class of Haegue Yang
Samuel Georgy, class of Hassan Khan
Gregor Lau, class of Monika Baer
Killa Schuetze, class of Tobias Rehberger
Vera Varlamova, class of Judith Hopf

Catalog

A catalog produced by the graduates is published to accompany the exhibition and is available free of charge. It contains individual contributions by the students, providing insights into their works, research and ideas. The catalog also includes an essay by guest professor Ghislaine Leung and further contributions by professors.

Program and guided tours

Opening: Tuesday, July 15, 7–10 pm
Entrance opposite of Holbeinstraße 8, 60596 Frankfurt a.M.

7 pm Opening Speeches & Prize Ceremony
Opening speeches by Barbara Clausen, Rector of Städelschule and Philipp Demandt, Director of Städel Museum, followed by the award ceremony of the graduate prizes. In the garden of the museum.

8:30 pm Sam Cottington, Monicka .Play
Exhibition space, duration 15 min.

A ghost haunts the Städel Museum. What they want to say is unclear, perhaps because a ghost might speak differently to a living person. In so much of the literature where they are present, the voices of ghosts function as a device to move the plot, under an assumption that their primary compulsion is to communicate with the living. Monicka imagines their motivation to language differently, as an echoic loop of displaced interiorities. These voices converge as something other than a will to return or to communicate with the living. Instead, it’s more like necromantic futurism, an erotic friction of flickering non-being, continuity without reproduction.

9:15 pm Emmilou Roessling, Schemes of an Hour
Garden of Städel Museum, duration 25 min.

A choreography for the liminal time of dusk and its peculiar affective ambiguity.

Choreography: Emmilou Roessling; composition and live violin: Julia Yoo Soon Gröning; performance: Hanako Hayakawa; original cast: Rachell Bo Clark, Amanda Barrio Charmelo & Hanako Hayakawa; dramaturgy & research: Lucas Eigel. With musical quotes by Julius Eastman.

Made possible through the support of the Ottilie-Roederstein-Stipend from the Hessian Ministry of Science and Research, Arts and Culture, the production funding from the Fonds Darstellende Künste, the travel grant of the Hans and Stefan Bernbeck Stiftung, Jean-Claude Maier Gallery Frankfurt am Main and the generous support of Städelschule Portikus e.V. With special thanks to Zimmerli of Switzerland und Ensemble Quillo for sponsoring parts of the costume and musical equipment.

From 11 pm Graduate Party
Daimlerstraße 32, 60314 Frankfurt am Main

Finissage: Sunday, August 10, Städel Museum, 2–5 pm
Schaumainkai 63, 60596 Frankfurt a.M.

2:15 pm Punch Viratmalee, Alte Meister—Heute
Meeting point: Ticket register, duration 30 min.

“I’m afraid I don’t make much sense today— but I’ve been thinking about the idea of Today. Today that could also be every day. One day (or even one hour) that is the culmination of many days if the condition is not dissimilar. The capital day of days. The only day that makes sense; then the number of days doesn’t matter. The goal is to create a day that is suspended, like the cloud that never passed by, dispersed, or accumulated further.

I welcome you all to have that day with me.”

The artist will guide the audience through her performance route in the Städel Museum collection and read an edited excerpt from her publication Alte Meister (in English).

3 pm Guided Tour in German
Meeting point: Entrance area of exhibition space, duration 60 min.

4 pm Anima Goyal, Compartmentalization of an ill body
Meeting point: Entrance area of exhibition space, duration 20 min.

When new wounds are
inflicted at later times, multiple
columns of defect develop.

A companion reading to the video work titled Gudiyaan that focuses on the artist’s ongoing research on chronic illness, through the slow decay in the body of old dolls and a beech tree.

22:00 pm Vera Varlamova, Painting Fish
Städelschule (Lichthalle), duration 15 min.

Her shameless indulgence in the sin of pictorial representation in public, accompanied by a life rendition of Bach’s aria Widerstehe doch der Sünde.

Supporters

Overture is made possible by major support from the Hessian Ministry of Science and Research, Art and Culture; Allen Overy Shearman Sterling LLP and the Ernst Max von Grunelius-Stiftung. We thank the Städelschule Portikus e.V., the Stiftung Städelschule für junge Künstler, the Sammlung Pohl gGmbH, Plastische Chirurgie Frankfurt | Hochtaunus and the Heinz und Gisela Friederichs Stiftung for the donation of graduate prizes and stipends.