“Line experiences many fates. Each creates a particular, specific world, from schematic limitation to unlimited expressivity. These worlds liberate line more and more from the instrument, leading to complete freedom of expression.”

Wassily Kandinsky, On Line (1919)

The exhibition Die Linie explores the line as a fundamental element of the visual arts. Moving between subjective gesture and constructive precision, it takes on countless roles: it structures surfaces and defines form, traces contours and boundaries, separates and connects. It documents time and space, describes reality, creates illusion, and captures the imaginary. In the infinite variety of its concepts, functions, and material forms, the line has much to reveal—about its time, its artists, and their concerns.

Starting from the classical medium of drawing, the exhibition examines the line’s potential to create artistic worlds and to respond, through art, to the world we live in. The focus lies on contemporary positions that transcend traditional genre boundaries, expanding the line into space and presenting it as a medium for reflecting on social and political realities.

With an expansive site-specific installation, Chiharu Shiota transforms the line into a three-dimensional form that will manifest as a dense web within the museum's architecture. As part of the exhibition “The Line,” Shiota’s “spatial drawing” explores the intangible: