Faith, Doubt, Form – What Do Art and Religion Still Have to Say to Each Other?

19.12 - 24.01.26

In an increasingly secularized world, the religious often seems to have faded to the margins of social perception. Yet contemporary art reveals that the human need for meaning, transcendence, and spiritual experience persists – beyond the institutional frameworks of faith.

The exhibition Faith, Doubt, Form explores the multifaceted relationship between art and religion today. Contemporary artists engage with religious symbols, rituals, and materials not as dogmas, but as open signs – as aesthetic, cultural, and emotional archives of the human condition.

The dialogue between art and religion has a long and complex history – from the sacred imagery of past centuries to the fragmented and often ambivalent expressions of the present. While religion once served as a central source of artistic inspiration, modern art has increasingly emancipated itself from institutional systems of belief. Yet precisely within this distance, a new and freer space emerges: one that allows for reflection on the religious not as dogma, but as experience, as trace, and as aesthetic possibility.

In contemporary art, the sacred is no longer presented as a fixed truth, but as something fragile and fleeting – a movement between faith and doubt, between visibility and invisibility. Many artists explore themes of transcendence, inner emptiness, ritual, and spiritual presence in material form. Their works do not affirm religious traditions but rather question them:
How much spirituality can reside in a gesture? Can a surface pray? Is light a medium of revelation – or merely a physical phenomenon?

Today’s artistic practices negotiate the religious on an aesthetic level. They do not seek the supernatural, but rather intensity, resonance – moments in which perception becomes experience. The sacred no longer appears as an “other space,” but as something that flickers into presence here and now: in a color, a sound, a breath. Art thus becomes a form of faith – not in a higher power, but in the potential of image, material, and human expression.

At the same time, doubt remains a central motif. The religious legacy is not only a source of inspiration but also of conflict, alienation, and critique. Many contemporary works reflect how deeply religious systems are entangled with power, gender, the body, and history. Engaging with the sacred becomes a way of engaging with memory and wound, with longing and loss.

In this suspension between belief and perception, a new form of spirituality emerges – one that no longer points to metaphysical truths, but to sensory experience itself. The sacred is no longer sought; it is felt, remembered, tested. Perhaps this is the contemporary revelation: the moment of aesthetic presence in which art and religion briefly touch – before drifting apart once more.

With Faith, Doubt, Form, the exhibition sheds light on the many facets of the religious in contemporary art: the fragility of truth, new perspectives on Christian iconography, the tension between ethics and aesthetics, the mediation of faith, and the existential boundaries between beginning and finitude.

By approaching the divine through creative expression, artists pose essential questions for our time: How does the sacred still inspire us today, and what do art and religion still have to say to each other?
The works on view become keys to understanding our complex present – and open up new spaces for thought, reflection, and experience.