The sound of images - group exhibition

27.06 - 19.07.25

Since the end of the 19th century, music has had a significant influence on artists' visual creations. The exhibition “The Sound of Images” attempts to explore the extent to which music has inspired painting and sculpture. It examines how musical structures, compositional rules, rhythmic patterns and sound shapes are translated into visual art. Abstract art plays a key role in this, as it is increasingly linked to the laws of harmony and the sound correspondences of music.

“The primal essence of colour is a dreamlike sound; it is light that has become music.”  With these words, the painter Johannes Itten summarised his synaesthetic endeavours. Since the beginning of modernism, the immateriality of colours and their quality as ethereal light waves related to acoustic sound waves have inspired artists to find new ways of expression. Music and visual art were able to flourish in a space of freedom. This was a space that artists continued to expand in the 20^(th) century, finally achieving a breakthrough in non-representational painting. Painters have always been fascinated by music's immateriality and its independence from the visible world. The central experimental field of visual art drew decisive impulses from the magnetic tension between music and painting.

The exhibition, “The Sound of Images”, attempts to relate the visible to the invisible. The exhibition essentially focuses on identifying the obvious influence of music on the visual arts, based on selected works of art. It is hardly surprising that abstract art is included, since detachment from a representational context is the primary prerequisite for a free, autonomous visual language. The phenomena of rhythm, dynamics, speed, simultaneity, cadence, and immateriality are astonishing, and are reflected in abstraction. Musical analogies thus provide artists with inspiration to explore rhythmic and melodic principles.

The exhibited visual artists share a common ground with music in their elevation of an aesthetic of wholeness and their pursuit of a synergy of expression that stimulates all the senses. This symbiosis of music and visual art results in a radical act of liberation, leading to the independence of colours, forms, and structures. As the German artist Günter Fruhtrunk put it, the ambition is to use “the effect of colour as my pictorial medium, sensual energy, non-colour as energy, and rhythmising as the innermost principle of mental activity”.

Participating artists: Manuela Bedeschi, Flavio Senoner, Karsten Hein, Rabeah Mashinchi, Jeremi Ca, Gerhard Hotter, Laura Pan

Manuela Bedeschi

Manuela Bedeschi focusses on a special kind of expressive exercise in which light - especially neon light - is an essential part of her reflection. In her works, the philosophical and spiritual dimension of her research can be observed in a deep and intense way. 

Flavio Senoner

The artist is interested in optical effects that arise from the interplay of material, structure, movement and light. The juxtaposed wooden elements create tensions that captivate, stimulate and challenge the viewer.

Karsten Hein

Born in Hamburg in 1937, the artist came into contact with the concrete art of Swiss artist Richard Paul Lohse at an early age. He creates outstanding, sculptural colour field compositions.

Rabeah Mashinchi

Abrupt contrasts, diverse colour oscillations and the dazzling interplay of lines and permuted structures are fundamental elements in Rabeah Mashinchi's artistic work.

Jeremi Ca

For the French artist Jeremi Ca the line is the essential element. Repetitive lines that bring forth a profound reflection on painting as a space of the mind, as a place where the inner spirit manifests itself. It is here that painting becomes silence, vortex, vision.

Gerhard Hotter

In his work, Gerhard Hotter explores the pictorial and poetic potential of mathematical structures. The examination of the logical system of numbers leads to visual structures that rhythmically organise the pictorial field.

Laura Pan

Laura Pan's pictorial universes lead us into vast, weightless spaces. She uses painting as a mental space to celebrate the inner movements and contractions of the soul. Moving lines are the expression of changes and mutations of existence.