TÜBINGEN.- Kunsthalle Tübingen will open Lars Eidinger. Present Perfect. In Dialogue with the Collection on October 10, bringing together the German actor and photographer’s images and videos with works by some of the most influential artists of the postwar period.
Running through February 28, 2027, the exhibition will include more than 200 works and marks the first time Eidinger’s photography has been placed in direct dialogue with key holdings from Kunsthalle Tübingen’s collection.
Eidinger has been taking photographs for more than three decades, first with a camera and later with his smartphone. His approach is instinctive and immediate. Rather than setting out to document specific subjects, he responds to what appears in front of him: a strangely pruned tree, an abandoned object, an eroded monument, a passerby who unexpectedly resembles someone else, or a moment in which ordinary behavior suddenly appears unfamiliar.
His photographs and videos are not cropped or subsequently manipulated, according to the museum. That directness is central to an exhibition that looks at how the apparently insignificant details of everyday life can become a means of examining the human condition.
“When I photograph, I follow an immediate stimulus,” Eidinger says in the exhibition material. “What matters to me is the magic of the moment, immediacy—presence.”
The show places that visual language beside works from a collection shaped in large part by art of the 1960s and 1970s. Artists of the postwar avant-garde similarly expanded the boundaries of art by turning toward everyday objects, mass culture, industrial materials, the human body and ordinary social experience.
Among the artists represented are Joseph Beuys, Jean Dubuffet, Alberto Giacometti, Dan Flavin, Yves Klein, Claes Oldenburg, Sigmar Polke, Anne and Patrick Poirier, Franz Erhard Walther, Ben Willikens, Carl Andre, Arman, César, Raymond Hains, Peter Roehr, Erwin Wurm and Katja Strunz.
Rather than arranging the exhibition chronologically, curator Nicole Fritz and Eidinger have organized it around broad questions of contemporary existence: daily life, memory and forgetting, the search for the self, instinct and expression, the experience of space, and the increasingly complicated relationship between people, consumer culture and technology.
One section, Who’s There – In Search of the Self, considers Eidinger’s photographs as a route into the unconscious. He has described the process as similar to interpreting a dream, with the meaning of seemingly banal moments only emerging later.
A 2023 photograph made in Tokyo, for example, shows a woman standing before a mirror while looking down at her smartphone, unable to see her own reflection. In the museum’s reading, the image becomes a quietly unsettling picture of contemporary self-alienation and the difficulty of introspection in a culture saturated by screens and constant media.
Elsewhere, the exhibition considers memory through photographs of damaged monuments and relics. These are shown in conversation with works by Anne and Patrick Poirier, whose archaeological fragments address the fragility of cultural memory, and with the work of Daniel Spoerri, whose preserved remains of meals turned ordinary life into both archive and artwork.
The section devoted to immediate expression brings Eidinger into dialogue with Sigmar Polke and Jean Dubuffet. Graffiti, scribbles and spontaneous marks found in public space become evidence of what Eidinger calls an “absolute will to express oneself,” while Polke’s irreverent embrace of popular culture and Dubuffet’s interest in Art Brut offer historical precedents for rejecting established hierarchies of artistic value.
Technology provides one of the exhibition’s darker undercurrents. Eidinger has filmed people using virtual-reality headsets and surrendering themselves to high-speed amusement rides, scenes that appear at once playful and faintly disturbing.
Although he resists describing his work as straightforward social criticism, the images sit alongside works by Pop and Nouveau Réalisme artists who were already responding to mass consumption, advertising and industrial culture in the 1960s.
In one of the exhibition’s sections, Don’t Cut the Wire – Consumption and Technology, works by Arman and Peter Roehr help connect the technological anxieties of the present with an earlier generation’s fascination with—and suspicion of—consumer society.
The project ultimately presents Eidinger not simply as an actor who takes photographs, but as an observer of contemporary behavior whose seemingly casual images are rooted in questions that have preoccupied artists for decades: how people construct identity, how societies remember, how the body navigates space, and how ordinary objects can reveal larger social realities.
Lars Eidinger. Present Perfect. In Dialogue with the Collection opens at Kunsthalle Tübingen on October 10, 2026 and remains on view through February 28, 2027. The exhibition was conceived and curated by Kunsthalle Tübingen director Dr. Nicole Fritz in collaboration with Eidinger.
