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Der Greif Studio x The Dean Munich: Site-Specific Art for a Munich Hotel
The Dean is an independent lifestyle hotel brand from Dublin. In Munich it occupies a reimagined postmodern building in the Westend, where designer Tatjana von Stein sets the curves of Jugendstil against the gloss and geometry of the city's 1980s music scene. To anchor the hotel in its city, curator Christian Ganzenberg, Director of Various Others, created The City Beneath the City, a site-specific art programme, and invited Der Greif Studio to bring five Munich-based artists into the guest rooms.
The Brief
The Dean wanted art that tied the Dublin lifestyle brand to Munich specifically, rather than to hotels in general. Ganzenberg, curating the wider programme, asked Der Greif Studio to take on the guest rooms with site-specific commissions from Munich-based artists.
The Concept: "The City Beneath the City"
Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities imagines cities made as much of memory and desire as of stone. Taking it as a starting point, alongside The Dean's own ethos of "Stories of Place", The City Beneath the City looks for the Munich below the surface: its myths, its lost scenes, the infrastructure nobody looks at twice.
Two layers run through the work. One is Jugendstil, Munich at its most visionary, when ornament and engineering arrived together. The other is the 1980s, the city's underground at its most restless. Each room becomes a point of entry into one of them.
What a guest finds is small and close at hand: an archival collage beside the bed, a night sky that turns out to be a trick of steel and daylight, stones from the river they may have crossed that afternoon. The art is found rather than displayed, and it asks to be looked at slowly.
The Curation
Together, the five Munich-based artists reach down through the city's layers. Sima Dehgani and Jens Masmann take the 1980s, one through the archive of its underground, the other through the myths of its music scene. Saskia Groneberg goes further back, to the Jugendstil engineering of the river crossings. Helena Petersen takes the Isar beyond the image altogether, into stone. Tobias Friedauer stays in the present, with a young generation's long summer held at a melancholy distance.
The range of forms matters as much as the subjects: collage, photographic illusion, sets of prints, a material installation, photographs paired with handwritten notes. Some works recur from room to room as editions, others appear only once, so no two guests meet the programme in quite the same way.
Production and Installation
Each commission was produced to its own specification. Dehgani’s collages are digital prints in an edition of 20. Masmann’s pigment prints on matt cotton rag are set in white-varnished limewood frames with a mirror-polished steel plate behind, in a signed and numbered edition of 20. Groneberg’s photographs and Friedauer’s archival pigment prints are mounted behind glass, Friedauer’s with a handwritten note pinned alongside.
The Artists
The five Munich artists each bring a distinct lens to The City Beneath the City, from archival collage and photographic illusion to river stones and handwritten notes. Their works make each room a point of entry into the city’s hidden layers.
Sima Dehgani (b. 1985, lives and works in Munich and Berlin) is a photographer and artist working in portrait and documentary photography, searching for new visual forms that make social issues visible. She studied art and multimedia at LMU Munich and at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich in the class of Dieter Rehm, and her work has been shown at the NS-Dokumentationszentrum, the Residenztheater Munich and with Public Art Munich. In »Re-Frame 1980« she works with Volker Derlath’s photographs of Munich’s 1980s underground and clippings from the Münchner Stadtzeitung Das Blatt, cutting, overpainting and reassembling them so the past is rewritten rather than recalled.
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.
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.
Helena Petersen (b. 1987, lives and works in Munich) is an artist who develops performative, camera-less methods in which materiality, time and chance shape the image. She studied in Amsterdam and at the Berlin University of the Arts, completing her MFA as Meisterschülerin with Leiko Ikemura, and her series »Pyrographie«, exposed by the muzzle flash of a pistol, was nominated for the Prix Pictet in 2021. »Isar Fries« brings the river itself indoors through alpine pebbles carried down by the Isar, a material counterpoint guests can touch.
Tobias Friedauer (lives and works in Munich) is an artist and photographer. [GAP: rest of bio, from Tobias. Birth year, education, one or two exhibitions or awards.] His photographs come from his book »In the areas of both the necessary and the pointless«, a title borrowed from Georges Perec, and hold a young generation’s long summer with detachment and melancholy, each hung beside a small handwritten note.
Münchner Kammerspiele Curation
The hotel’s permanent collection extends the programme with 19 photographic works from Der Greif’s year-long exhibition at the Therese-Giehse-Halle of the Münchner Kammerspiele in 2024. The Kammerspiele, one of Munich’s most celebrated theatres, is itself a landmark of the Jugendstil era, so the works arrive carrying one of the city’s own layers with them. They are by Lisa Großkopf, Zita Frohloff, Armin Amirian, Lê Quyên Nguyễn, Berk Kır, Paul Hiller, Milena Villalón, Oliver Kartak, Forrest Simmons, Lars Borges, Anqi Li, Ernesto Solana, Alvin Ng, Sari Zagyvai, Fenqiang Liu, Christian Nicolay, Melanie Schoeniger, Ana Hell and Camilla Gorini.
