Yoshiyuki Miura (*1958)
01.02.2026 - 12.04.2026
Yoshiyuki Miura is coming to Riegel – and is bringing a whole waterfall with him. The exceptional Japanese artist, twice winner of the international André-Evard-Prize within 15 years and most recently winner of the 7th André-Evard-Prize, is now celebrating his first solo exhibition at Galerie Messmer.
Miura’s works are not quiet pictures for the background – they draw you into the room with force, rhythm and meditative power. He works with unusual materials such as steel, rice, lenses, beans and light to create fascinating, poetic spatial and wall objects.
His famous waterfall in particular looks like a natural phenomenon on steel: a visual thundering, somewhere between Japanese aesthetics, inner peace and raw energy.
Made from countless stainless steel pins, it not only impresses with its monumental presence, but also marks a special moment in the history of Galerie Messmer: at 6.60 meters long and 1.80 meters high , it is the largest work ever exhibited in the gallery.
With this rice painting made from around 10,000 grains of rice, he won first place at the 7th International André-Evard Prize in 2025, which can also be experienced in this exhibition with a new presentation.
In addition to the material of rice, he also uses beans and lentils, thus referring to the cultural roots of the East, while the three-dimensional arrangement assigns his works to Western art. This creates a dialog between Eastern material symbolism and Western formal language.
Miura’s spherical works made of stainless steel wires and light tie in with the quiet materiality of the rice painting, transforming the theme into a spatial and light-based form.
Miura’s spherical works made of light and thousands of individually colored stainless steel pins offer a very special symbiosis of light, color and materiality. For a single light object, the artist uses around 3,000 to 4,000 stainless steel pins to create a floating, spherical structure. The interplay of light, color and material dissolves fixed contours and actively incorporates the space into the work. The spheres appear both technically precise and poetic at the same time , thus thematizing the tension between order, movement and immaterial appearance.
The exhibition offers the opportunity to experience Miura’s multi-layered work in its quiet intensity, in which calm and inner strength condense into a palpable energy, and to enter a space that invites reflection and personal interpretation. Let us embark on this unique journey around the world together.
Antonio Marra (*1959)
LA BELLA FIGURA
19.04.2026 - 21.06.2026
The internationally acclaimed artist Antonio Marra has already won the Audience Award twice at the Kunsthalle Messmer as part of the International Evard Prize ceremony, and once he also came second among the finalists.
The Messmer Gallery is therefore now dedicating a large solo exhibition to our public favorite with the title LA BELLA FIGURA Antonio Marra was born in Volturara Irpina, Italy, in 1959 and now lives and works in Offenbach am Main.
More than 50 solo exhibitions and a further 28 group exhibitions have made his oeuvre internationally visible – from New York via Shanghai, Jinan and Jiangxi to the Algarve, San Francisco, Venice, Mykonos and Vienna.
His work has also been presented in numerous cities in Germany, including Baden-Baden, Hamburg, Frankfurt and Munich.
Everything in life has two sides: This experience seems to be the starting point for Antonio Marra’s kinetic art. The artist achieved international fame with his colorful, moving images. They also invite visitors to get involved in these surprising changes!
In his works, he stages a sophisticated play with perception and illusion, his pictures appearing like constructed pictorial spaces in which reality and imagination overlap and combine to create a multi-layered visual dialog.
The closer you get to them, the more they change : perspectives shift, structures emerge, new impressions arise. In this way, an ever-changing visual cosmos unfolds, which appears familiar and surprising at the same time and encourages the viewer to make up their own minds.
Questioning viewing habits and rediscovering the act of seeing
Marra draws on a formal vocabulary of clear geometric structures, lines and precisely placed areas of color, which in its consistency is reminiscent of the
tradition of Op Art and kinetic art. At the same time, his works are not limited to purely visual effects. Instead, they open up multi-layered pictorial spaces that set the viewer’s gaze in motion. As you look at them, the structure of the forms seems to rearrange itself again and again: Colors change their effect depending on the point of view, structures shift and seemingly stable orders begin to flow. This creates pictorial worlds that suggest permanent movement and invite the viewer to constantly discover new perspectives.
It is precisely this play of shifts and transitions between different levels that gives Marra’s work its particular uniqueness.
Immerse yourself in the changing worlds of this colorful and humorous artist!
past exhibitions
André Evard (1876 – 1972)
30.11. – 25.01.2026
Chrisitane Grimm – Floating spaces
29.06. – 14.09.2025
Our artists
Michael Urtz
About the artist The artist, born in 1952, studied from 1972 to 1979 at the State Academy of Fine Arts in Stuttgart with Prof. KRH
Alain Vaissiere
About the artist As a former engineer and manager in the field of aerospace, Alain Vaissière (*1957) is particularly fascinated by the possibilities of technology