Maria VMier. I follow the wind through the stone

With I follow the wind through the stone, New York-based artist Maria VMier (b. 1985 in Passau, Germany) realises the annual commission project at Haus der Kunst. Since 2021, the institution has each year commissioned a site-specific work for the staff entrance and the spaces around it. From their encounters with the building and the people who shape it, a constellation of interconnected works has emerged, unfolding from the staff entrance through the Passage and into the Mittelhalle. At the staff entrance, VMier has reassembled the large outdoor letters that once stood as the institution's facade signage (2011 – 2020) into a new phrase, "Bauch der Kunst" (the belly of art), paying tribute to those who sustain the space. In the Passage, two large drawing installations translate the building's surfaces into dense brushwork on paper. In the Mittelhalle and the entrance area, a series of small cast aluminium sculptures emerges from the corners and crevices of the marble pillars, inspired by the fossils embedded in the Saalburg marble – somewhere between facial features and organic growth, they read like a subtle eruption of resistance within the monumental interior. The