Press Preview: July 17, 2025, 2:00 PM
On View: July 18 – October 5, 2025
April 16, 2025 (Germany) – Kunsthalle Schweinfurt presents Rolf Sachs: be-rühren, the artist's most comprehensive institutional exhibition to date, offering a survey of his multidisciplinary oeuvre from the 1990s to today. On view from July 18 – October 5, 2025, the exhibition features over 150 works, ranging from modular furniture, photography, and sculpture to his latest paintings, which have now become an integral part of his practice. The title be-rühren, a wordplay on the German verb ‘to touch’, captures Sachs's focus: a deeply empathetic and sensory exploration of the human condition.
Rolf Sachs: be-rühren is conceived as a journey through the artist’s career-long experimentation. Taking over the entire ground floor of the museum and unfolding in a non-chronological order, the exhibition invites visitors to engage with Sachs's bold, multifaceted practice. Each room showcases individual bodies of work and site-specific installations, revealing his distinctively playful and inquisitive nature across a variety of mediums. The exhibition also proposes a transversal perspective on the ideas that have shaped his practice from his beginnings to today — a poetic sensibility, an empathetic approach, a fascination with materiality and a continuous reimagining of domestic objects.
Transforming Found Objects
The exhibition delves into the artist’s long-lasting fascination with everyday objects and his sensitivity to a wide variety of materials he has worked with, exploring how these elements run through his entire oeuvre. A room reuniting sculptures from the past 30 years reveals how Sachs has recontextualized everyday objects and materials in a humorous and deeply reflective manner, evident in pieces such as Angst (depicted above) and Sisyphus. This approach is also reflected in a series of monumental vitrines, Heu, Ross, Wolle, and Mist, filled with hay, manure, wool, and horsehair, or in Bodenständigkeit, a pine branch cast in bronze. These works also stand as a testament to Sachs’s deep connection to Alpine culture and express the artist's desire to preserve objects and memories with synesthetic or personal resonance. Presented for the first time since the mid-1990s, Sachs’s early Ha-all environment draws attention to the emotional potential of a seemingly mundane material like sound-absorbing foam.
Through Sachs’s Lens
In his photographic practice, Sachs primarily employs long exposures and flash techniques to capture dynamic movement and the fleeting, mysterious essence of people, sculptures, and everyday objects. Drawing inspiration from the traditional still life genre, his Moving Stills and Shadows reflect on the passage of time and humanity’s yearning to capture it. They are also an exercise in morphing an object’s material essence through various light sources, giving props a life of their own. In his Shadows series, Sachs dissolves the inherent solidity of glass by creating nebulous ghostly effects. In Moving Stills, toilet paper, cans and spaghetti are transformed into lively and ambiguous beings. Both projects reveal Sachs’s particular sensibility towards expressing human emotions through objects. In his yearlong Camera in Motion series, Sachs draws from his Swiss upbringing, using experimental photography and long exposures to transport viewers on a train journey through the Albula railway line, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Mirroring the speed of the journey, Sachs's photographs capture fleeting, random moments, showcasing the inevitable passage of time. The contrast between the focused object and the passing landscape causes the works to hover between abstraction and reality, photography and painting.
A New Interpretation of Form and Function
The exhibition presents Sachs's modular furniture series p-arts + fun c'tion for the first time in over 30 years, offering a rare glimpse into this conceptual body of work. By reducing his creations to the fundamental elements of angles and cubes, Sachs challenges traditional conventions with his chairs, armchairs, and desks, all free of nails or screws, relying solely on gravity and friction for assembly. None of the furniture pieces are static; their form remains dynamic and fluid, capable of taking on an infinite number of configurations. This innovative approach allows the pieces to be reinterpreted repeatedly, giving them a certain sense of "freedom". With the Attraction bed, Sachs alludes to the varied characters of its users, where cold steel meets warm wood, suggesting a certain empathy between the two halves of the bed, just as ideally between the people who use it.
Since 1992, Sachs has continually reinvented the Horgenglarus chair — a purely functional piece of furniture that is usually used in schools and administrative buildings. Using materials like silicone, slate, wax, felt, and resin, Sachs transforms the chair, offering a new, altered perception with each reinterpretation. This modest chair is consistently given a new “sense of self” through these distinct revisions.
Painting: A New Chapter in Sachs’s Oeuvre
The grand hall of the museum unveils the artist’s latest creative endeavour, a series of paintings and drawings that Sachs has rigorously devoted himself to since 2020. Conceptually distinct yet interconnected, the exhibition includes his Can Paintings, the Défroissage series, and the immediate, physically expressive Touchée works. These bodies of work, which often blur the lines between painting and object, are defined by a direct, physical engagement with the medium. The Touchée works are created through a tactile, empathetic process in which the artist uses his fingers to touch and paint the canvas. The result is often abstract, presenting a vibrant new form of expression born from the intimate nature of the process. Sachs’s painting, straddling abstraction and figuration, are a direct manifestation of his search for the intangible that transcends the body. His canvasses aim to establish an emotional and visceral connection with the viewer.
Parallel to Rolf Sachs’s exhibition at the Kunsthalle Schweinfurt, DISTANZ is publishing a 300-page, richly illustrated monograph titled Rolf Sachs. Edited by Coralie Malissard and Salvatore Lacagnina and designed by the London-based studio Kellenberger & White, the book features essays by notable contributors. Available in both English and German, it provides new perspectives on Sachs’s prolific career. (Release: Summer 2025).
The exhibition was created in collaboration with the Institute for Cultural Exchange in Tübingen and was made possible by the generous support of the Schweinfurt Cultural Foundation, the District of Lower Franconia, the Schweinfurt Municipal Savings Bank Foundation and the Barbara Brockardt Foundation in Coburg.
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NOTES TO EDITORS:
The exhibition is organised in collaboration with the Institute for Cultural Exchange in Tübingen and is curated by Coralie Malissard, Studio Rolf Sachs.
Kunsthalle Schweinfurt, Rüfferstraße 4, 97421
Schweinfurt, Germany
https://www.kunsthalle-schweinfurt.de
Opening Hours:
Daily: 10:00 AM – 7:00 PM
Thursdays: 10:00 AM – 9:00 PM
Closed on Mondays (open on public holidays)
About Rolf Sachs:
Rolf Sachs (b. 1955) is a multidisciplinary artist and designer currently based in Rome. He applies a distinctive humane and conceptual approach across a multitude of mediums, ranging from sculpture, photography, and design and through to architectural projects and set designs for opera and ballet. His move to Rome has inspired Sachs to finally dedicate himself seriously to painting. Since the 1990s, Sachs has challenged preconceived applications of materials, processes, and everyday objects, imbuing them with novel meaning. Deftly employing humor and wit, his work seeks to elicit emotional, sensory reactions. However, his work has nothing of the dryness that is often associated with conceptual art. Rather, it is full of humanity, sensibility, and respect towards the materials he uses. It is poetic, humorous, tongue and cheek, but never irreverent. Currently, his work is particularly focused on exploring the human psyche, people’s character, relationships, soul and spirit.
His work has been exhibited internationally in galleries and museums including the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, the Museum for Applied Art, Cologne; the MAK – Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna; the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice; Vitra Design Museum, Weil am Rhein; Stalla Madulain, Madulain; Hauser & Wirth, Gstaad; Galerie von Bartha, S-chanf and Monika Sprüth, Cologne.
@rolfsachsstudio
Image Credits:
1. Rolf Sachs, 'Angst', 2013. Courtesy of Byron Slater.
2. Rolf Sachs, 'Köln, Half Chair', 1992. Courtesy of Rolf Sachs Studio.
3. Rolf Sachs, 'Statuette', 2020. Courtesy of Rolf Sachs Studio.
4. Rolf Sachs, ‘Dirty Thoughts', 2009. Courtesy of Rolf Sachs Studio.
5. Rolf Sachs, 'Allure', 2025. Courtesy of Rolf Sachs Studio.
6. Rolf Sachs, 'Gloom and Faith', 2024. Courtesy of Rolf Sachs Studio.
7. Rolf Sachs, 'Frühling', 2022. Courtesy of Rolf Sachs Studio.