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Five Munich-based artists were commissioned to make new work for the guest rooms of The Dean Munich, each responding to a different layer of the city. We spoke to two of them, Saskia Groneberg and Jens Masmann, about what the process involved.
We started by asking what the brief asked for, and what each of them made of it. For Jens, it was an invitation to look at his own city with fresh eyes: "The brief was quite open. It asked for a narrative relation of the artwork to the city, where the hotel is located, in order to build a bridge for guests to the region they are visiting. For me it was a natural process to use my surrounding, my city as part of my narration."
Saskia's path to her subject took a little longer to find. "The brief asked me to engage with Munich's Jugendstil (Art Nouveau) and its 1980s era and to develop a commissioned work for multiple hotel rooms. Initially, I wasn't quite sure how to make the theme my own." The answer, when it came, was somewhere she already knew well. "Then I realized that my favorite place in Munich actually centers around a humble Jugendstil pedestrian bridge crossing the Isar river. I did a bit of a deep dive into the history of the bridge and I decided I had found my place and my topic. Built in 1898, it was constructed to carry hidden water and power lines into the city center, serving as the prelude to Munich's electrification. That purpose gave the bridge its name 'Kabelsteg', literally meaning 'cable bridge'. The river itself echoes my long interest in the relationship between culture and nature. Instead of being confined to a canal like most rivers in big cities, in many sections, the Isar has these ever shifting gravel banks, a reminder of the nearby Alps. This natural character is the result of renaturation efforts that trace back to the environmental movements of the 1980s."
What changed, we wondered, between their usual practice and making something for this specific space? For Jens, surprisingly little. "My procedure was in general following my usual way of working, but of course I was reacting to the spatial circumstances of the specific rooms where my work would be shown, when it came to details of presentation: size, framing etc. I wanted to ensure that communication between artwork, space and viewers would work well."
For Saskia, the shift was less about method than about intimacy, and audience. "What was new for me in this project was photographing a space I already knew intimately. I lived nearby for many years, and I would often pause there as I crossed the river cycling to my former studio or heading home. I would go there to cool off on hot days, or to satisfy my need for nature in the middle of the city. I often took phone snapshots looking down from the bridge onto the riverbanks, watched people swimming and sunbathing, observed the ducks, trees and the beautiful shadows. So when I decided to shoot this commission, I already knew the angles, I knew how people move there. I knew when to expect it to be quiet and when it would be crowded. All the visual research and observation had already happened over the years. Another big difference to my other work is that I had a specific audience in mind. I knew these pieces would be in hotel rooms, seen by visitors who might just stay a night or two. Munich is a city heavy with stereotypes – many of which are true –, but it has so many more facets to it, that are often overlooked. I liked the idea of challenging the clichés, of showing a passerby something different, dear, and personal about this city."
"I liked the idea of challenging the clichés, of showing a passerby something different, dear, and personal about this city." — Saskia Groneberg
We asked Saskia what's the connection between the Munich she found in the Jugendstil engineering of the river crossings and the Munich that ends up on the wall, whether something got lost, or found, in turning one into the other. "Of course, I filtered, I observed and I chose. I would hope that I captured a certain 'essence' of the place. In all my photographic work, I tend to seek out moments that are, in a way, universal, talking about the human condition. Most of the photographs mirror those organic Jugendstil patterns of the bridge in one way or another. For example, when a shot is framed through the tangled branches of a tree, or when the angle of the legs of a person walking in the water is echoed by the shadows of the railings. The engineering of the bridge originally took its inspiration from nature, and this is a subtle way to bring that connection full circle."
And finally, their piece now sits in a room someone will inhabit. What do they hope stays with a guest, even if that guest couldn't say exactly why? "In every room, there is another composition of three photographs in different sizes that correspond with each other," Saskia says. "I think you could compare them to a Haiku, just in visual form. They carry lightness and complexity, and they leave space for imagination and interpretation. They might evoke memories of other places in the visitors. Some might not even notice the work, while others will enjoy a moment of contemplation after a long day. A few even might get curious and try to find the actual place. I like that the work can either be a quiet backdrop or an invitation to explore, whether within the pieces itself or outside in the city."
Jens sees the same unpredictability as part of what makes the setup interesting in the first place. "One interesting aspect of this setup is that guests at the hotel are accidentally confronted with different artworks. They do not choose a room for a specific piece of art, but the art work has to try to win their attention. In a perfect flow, then the viewer feels like diving deeper into the artistic narration, beyond formal attraction."
"One interesting aspect of this setup is that guests at the hotel are accidentally confronted with different artworks." — Jens Masmann
Saskia Groneberg (b. 1985, Munich, lives and works in [GAP: confirm, a 2025 listing has her in Berlin]) is an artist whose work examines artificially shaped nature, in parks, landscapes and ornamental plants, as a projection of human longing. She studied in Stuttgart and Leipzig, was shortlisted for the Prix Pictet, and has exhibited at the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Deichtorhallen Hamburg and Fotomuseum Winterthur. In »Kabelsteg« she follows an 1898 Jugendstil footbridge over the Isar, built to carry cables from the Muffatwerk power plant, tracing the river’s renaturalisation across ten sets of three photographs.
Jens Masmann (b. 1968, lives and works in Munich) is an artist and photographer for whom the photobook has become the main medium, and whose work returns to photography’s relationship with reality and its vague claim to truth. In 2013 he co-founded the self-publishing collective million books, and his books are held in the Tate Modern photobook collection and the library of Fotomuseum Winterthur. For »Arabella, fake starry night«, from his series »Romantic«, he turns to the Arabella-Hochhaus, home to Giorgio Moroder’s Musicland Studios. Shot in daylight and printed as a negative, it becomes a night view, with stars glinting from a mirror-polished steel plate behind hand-cut openings in the print.