From 10 October 2026, the Kunsthalle Tübingen will be hosting the exhibition PRESENT PERFECT. In it, the gallery will juxtapose works by the artist Lars Eidinger with various pieces from the collection in a dialogic arrangement.
Image above: Lars Eidinger, Paris, 2021, Courtesy of Ruttkowski;68, Köln, Düsseldorf, Paris, New York
For over thirty years, the actor and photographer Lars Eidinger has been capturing reality, first with his camera and later with his smartphone. Lars Eidinger’s photographs and videos are created intuitively, in harmony with his surroundings. They depict the world as it is, whilst at the same time revealing what is often overlooked, the unsightly and the less refined traces of lived experience – in short, making the invisible visible.
With a free-floating awareness, Eidinger photographs bizarre and overlooked routines of everyday life: a stone sculpture without hands by the roadside, geometrically pruned trees and hedges, or passers-by who look like doppelgängers. The snapshots and scenes that Eidinger appears to capture casually provide an immediate and unvarnished insight not only into the human condition, but also, in passing, lay bare the deeper layers of Western affluent society, allowing the existential emotions, needs and rituals of contemporary people to be expressed unfiltered.
Under the title Present Perfect, the Kunsthalle Tübingen, in close collaboration with the artist, is not only exhibiting photographs and videos by Lars Eidinger, but is also placing selected groups of works from his visual anthropology in dialogue with works by other artists.
In this thematically structured exhibition, photographs by Lars Eidinger are shown alongside iconic works from the Kunsthalle’s collection for the first time. The museum’s own collection has been gradually expanded since the 1970s through permanent loans and now comprises primarily works from the 1960s and 1970s. Like Lars Eidinger, the pioneers of the avant-garde extended art to encompass reality, both thematically and through the use of objects as readymades.
The exhibition, comprising over 200 works, therefore traces the points of contact between Lars Eidinger’s photography and the pioneers of the avant-garde, thereby encouraging visitors to engage with the work and reflect further. The exhibition is organised thematically around existential themes such as everyday life, memory and forgetting, self-exploration, instinct and the need for expression, the exploration of space, as well as consumerism and technological advancement; alongside Lars Eidinger’s photographs and videos, it includes, for example, works by Georg Friedrich Zundel, Yves Klein, Ben Willikens and Sigmar Polke, right through to selected contemporary artists such as Erwin Wurm and Katja Strunz.
OTHER ARTISTS IN THE EXHIBITION (SELECTION): Carl Andre, Arman, Robert Berry, Joseph Beuys, César, Jean Dubuffet, Rupprecht Geiger, Alberto Giacometti, Dan Flavin, Raymond Hains, William Kentridge, Yves Klein, Claes Oldenburg, Sigmar Polke, Anne & Patrick Poirier, Peter Roehr, Daniel Speorri, Katja Strunz, Franz Erhard Walther, Ben Willikens, Georg Friedrich Zundel
Dr Nicole Fritz, Chair and Director of the Kunsthalle Tübingen Foundation, was responsible for the concept and curation. A magazine accompanying the exhibition features a conversation between Nicole Fritz and Lars Eidinger.
WHERE?
Kunsthalle Tübingen
Philosophenweg 76
72076 Tübingen
WHEN?
Saturday, 10. October 2026 until Sunday, 28. February 2027
open Tue–Wed and Fri–Sun 11:00 am – 6:00 pm
Thu 11:00 am – 7:00 pm
