July, August, September | 2005

Frank Metzger

Visual Art
  • Groesch Metzger © Privat

Frank Metzger’s artistic practice, developed in close collaboration with Wiebke Grösch, centers on the critical investigation of socio-cultural and urban issues. Together, they explore how historical events, utopian ideas, and power structures are inscribed into urban spaces, searching for traces and hidden narratives that connect the past with the present. Their work is particularly interested in how the meanings of events, ideas, places, and objects shift over time, and in the transformations and losses that occur as personal experience becomes historical record-from biography to historiography.

For Metzger, the urban environment is a living archive, shaped by performances, role assignments, and the mechanisms of representation and order embedded in architecture and social space. Their projects interrogate these structures through installations, site-specific performative interventions, objects, photography, video, and text.

During their residency at Villa Aurora, Metzger developed “A Village in the City, Disappearing,” a photographic research project that uses the history of the 1932 Olympic Village as a lens to examine the transformation of Los Angeles’s urban landscape.

Metzger’s work has been widely exhibited in Germany and internationally, including:

  • Frankfurter Kunstverein (solo, 2012)

  • VISIT TINGBJERG, Copenhagen (2012)

  • La Kunsthalle – Centre d'art contemporain, Mulhouse, France (2011)

  • Akademie der Künste, Berlin (2010)

  • CAC Bretigny, France (2010)

  • Arp Museum Bahnhof Rolandseck, Remagen (2010)

  • Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt/Main (2009)

  • basis, Frankfurt/Main (solo, 2008)

  • ZKM – Museum für Neue Kunst, Karlsruhe (2008)

  • Skulpturenpark Berlin_Zentrum, Berlin (solo, 2007)

  • Museum für angewandte Kunst, Frankfurt/Main (2007)

  • Bildmuseet, Umeå, Sweden (2007)

  • Bergen Kunsthall, Norway (2006)

  • Museum der Bildenden Künste Leipzig (2006)

  • NGBK, Berlin (2006)

  • Preus Museum, Horten, Norway (2006)

  • Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin (2005)

  • Kunstmuseum Bonn (2005)

  • Bonner Kunstverein (2003)

  • Kunsthalle Bremen (2003)

  • Halle für Kunst, Lüneburg (2003)

Frank Metzger’s work continues to probe the shifting meanings and power dynamics embedded in the urban landscape, offering nuanced perspectives on the interplay between memory, history, and space.