A bold and sensory journey into Rolf Sachs’ art is now open at Kunsthalle Schweinfurt, offering a rare glimpse into three decades of the artist’s multidisciplinary work. Titled Be-rühren (German for “touch”), the exhibition runs from July 18th through October 5th, 2025, and features over 150 works that blend sculpture, design, painting, and experimental photography in unexpected and deeply poetic ways.
Experimental photography as poetic exploration
Known for his tactile and emotionally charged practice, Sachs uses experimental photography to push visual boundaries. In his Camera in Motion series—shot along the Albula railway in Switzerland—the artist uses long exposures to capture fleeting landscapes in a blur of abstraction and memory. These dreamlike images, caught somewhere between movement and stillness, reflect Sachs’s fascination with perception and temporality.
Transforming everyday objects into art
Sachs’s talent for transforming everyday objects is a defining thread throughout the exhibition. In large-scale installations like Heu, Ross, Wolle, Mist, materials such as hay, horsehair, and manure are placed in monumental glass vitrines, evoking sensory memory and Alpine heritage. Another standout is Bodenständigkeit, a simple pine branch cast in bronze—an object elevated to near-mythic status through its transformation.
While Be-rühren is a retrospective, it’s also a living, breathing portrait of an artist still in motion. With newly debuted paintings, tactile sculptures, and unexpected compositions, Rolf Sachs continues to blur the line between the intimate and the industrial, the personal and the universal. Don’t miss this extraordinary exhibition, open now through October 5th.
Dirty Thoughts, 2009
Courtesy of ROLF SACHS STUDIO
Heu, 2023
Photography by KATJA MEULI