Alternde Meister

Alternde Meister brings twenty-five performers into dialoguewith the Gemäldegalerie’s collection, confronting pictorialvisions with the transience of contemporary bodies and cultural lives. A cast spanning generations and disciplines—actors, artists, singers, dancers, and nightlife figures—appear as living images among the paintings. The Gemäldegalerie is a repository of European representationsof mortality and metamorphosis—and an institution devoted to keeping those images from aging. Alternde Meister fashions a short circuit between the mythic time of its religious and allegorical holdings, in which single moments are held in permanent suspension, and the lived time of bodies and careers in the arts.

The visibility of the latter is never constant but arrives in waves—born by a particular cultural moment, before fading when attention moves elsewhere, demanding that the artist begin again. The piece is also a collective portrait of Berlin: a city that, in recent decades, has built its identity on youth and freedom, but which is now reckoning with wrinkles in this story. The performance runs on a thirty-minute loop during opening hours. At the start of each cycle performers occupy fixed positions spread throughout the galleries, in states of stillness—sleeping, resting, appearing dead—arranged among the paintings as though they had always belonged to the collection. In the minutes that follow, each awakens, dresses, and carries out an individual action before converging on a shared location for a communal ceremony.

The group then disperses and a new loop begins. Visitors are free to enter the work at any point, follow a single performer, move between rooms, or return repeatedly to the central ritual over the course of their visit. The drama borrows its arc from Lucas Cranach’s meditation on aging and conceit, The Fountain of Youth (1546). Cranach depicts a scene of supernatural age reversal: old women restored to youth by bathing in a stone pool, dried off, then dressed in high fashion before being welcomed into a garden of music, dancing, and feast. The work is a satire of courtly vanity.

The fountain’s magic does not restore virtue but, rather, costume and appetite. The performance structure of Alternde Meister retains Cranach’s sequence of transformation, adornment, and festive assembly but overwrites the final miracle. Our cast dress, prepare, and converge on a funeral. In each cycle one performer is placed at the centre and mourned by the rest of the company, accompanied by a choral excerpt from Gustav Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder (1901–04)—a cycle of songs based on Friedrich Rückert’s poems of parental bereavement. The lyric closes not on devastation but rest. In its final image the children are returned home, asleep as though nothing has been lost. The performance ritual follows thistrajectory before overturning it: mourning breaks into collective laughter, this laughter freezes into a tableau, and for an instant grief and vitality hold the same pose. Then this image dissolvesand the departed rises again to begin a new loop. 

The performers of Alternde Meister do not illustrate the paintings on show. Into rooms built to conserve, they introduce what is fleeting—breath, fatigue, voice, gravity. The Gemäldegalerie’s holdings will outlast every body in the building, visitor and performer alike; that is the museum’s promise and the source of its melancholy. For the duration of each loop, the performance places the perishable at the centre of the permanent collection and asks for it to be looked at with the same attention. Nothing is acquired, restored, or saved. Alternde Meister is, above all, a work about looking.

Museums preserve images that have resisted time, while the bodies moving through them cannot. Western painting has often sought permanence through the ideal body. This performance turns its attention elsewhere: towards bodies in which time has inscribed itself. Wrinkles, scars, exhaustion, and tenderness are not signs of decline but of experience. Every body becomes an archive of the life it has lived. By asking visitors to look at these performers with the same patience and concentration they bring to the Old Masters, the work quietly shifts the question. It is no longer only the ageing body that is being examined, but the gaze that meets it. 

Selected Scenes At the beginning of the loop, near the museum's rotunda, actress Eva-Maria Keller lies on a bench, shifting between fitful sleep and the stillness of the dead. In the opposite gallery another performer rests in the posture of a recumbent Hercules — a body once synonymous with strength, now at rest. Later, they will undertake their labours. The pairing sets the piece's terms in its opening moments: bodies at work and at rest among images that never tire. Individual scenes throughout the galleries develop that tension in different directions. Before a painting of Adam and Eve, a drag performer puts their persona on and off, a labour of self-invention performed beside Western painting’s founding image of shame and expulsion. One genesis faces another, through a body made not by nature but by culture, desire, and theatrical self-determination. Where the painting fixes the division of the sexes at the moment of creation, the performance treats that division as the first costume—put on nightly, taken off nightly, no more permanent than youth itself. 

Near Jean Bellegambe’s Last Judgement (1520-1525), longtime doorman Frank Kuenster occupies the role of museum guard, scrutinizing the audience as they contemplate the painting—setting up a triangular circuit of looking and looked at.Judgement circulates here as a poetic complex moving across aesthetic, social, and spiritual registers, with no verdict ever delivered; only the questions persist—who gains entry, who is recognised, who remains visible? Nearby, pole performer Frznte takes up the emblematic Venus of Cranach's Fountain of Youth and unfastens its gendered premise, through an  androgynous presence oscillating between confidence and fatigue, climbing, slowly spinning, and falling. What the painting stations at its centre as a fixed ideal—the desirable body, forever young—is here set in motion and subjected to gravity, the one force that Cranach’s pool cannot suspend. The performers drawn from theatre, including Frank Büttner and Sema Poyraz, carry decades of stage history into the galleries. Frank Büttner’s career traces the shifting cultural landscape of East and West Berlin, embodying a city whose divisions have never entirely disappeared but continue to shape its identities. Sema Poyraz brings another history of Berlin to the work, one shaped by migration and the city’s multicultural reality.

Together, their bodies carry lived histories that extend far beyond any single role. Alongside them, WestBam, whose anthems soundtracked the Love Parade, sits hunched over a laptop, building playlists and tracks—returned to the quiet, ongoing labour that his public visibility has always concealed. Between the Old Masters and these living bodies a further scene comes into focus—the city’s own mythology. Here, Berlin appears as its own kind of performer: perpetually staging youth while carrying accumulated histories beneath the surface.