the first exhibition opened on july 2nd, 2021, and it was, quite literally, a family affair. gilberto botti — architect, painter, and father of spazio's founder — showed three paintings of the isar landscape along the walk from the zoological garden into town: chimneys and a railway bridge rising out of the trees like the abandoned buildings of some heroic landscape. elaine rosemary kaye hung small canvases of schwabing north mid-construction, and melissa mayergalbraith showed paintings from her knotenpunkt series, figures caught between the figurative and the abstract. the show was called einblicke — insights — and ran all summer in a factory courtyard nobody knew yet.
gilberto botti, from einblicke (2021) — the first show.
that november, joão bragança arrived with paper, light and shadow. he had learned cardboard as an architecture student and rediscovered it in tokyo, in kengo kuma's studio — “the japanese use handcraft techniques of incomparable precision.” his wall pieces stayed up through february and set the tone for what the space would become: material taken more seriously than category.
2022 — the year of glass, and of guests
in may 2022 the courtyard filled with glass. benedikt peirotén of studio peipei showed from the ashes — vessels melted from the ash of wood-fired pizza ovens, crushed shells from fish restaurants, and sand. prosper riba vilardell, working as theglassapprentice, blew his quijote series next door, and the munich turner luis unützer showed bowls and sculptures in local oak. july brought munich jewellery week, with evelyne pretti's dna collection from brazil and the turkish architect handan yalki toyhan's nature-pattern pieces — and, one warm evening, gürmet: turkish wine, meze and art in the courtyard. in october gianna zanafredi — venice biennale 2011, chicago biennial 2013 — showed materia memoria (“the matter in my paintings is life, history, dust, earth, water and landscape”), followed by collective subresults, a two-day group show of four munich women working in jewellery, graphics, photography and textile. in december cyrcus came up from milan — a digital fabrication platform straight from salone del mobile, showing in germany for the first time — and camilla richter's lichtspiele carried the year out with dichroic glass that repainted the room every hour.
cyrcus, from milan to the courtyard — december 2022. their pieces are still in the collection today.
2023 — the space learns new formats
in march 2023 the room celebrated its own expansion with luce, a modular lighting system launched by the giu design office — industry 4.0 methods meeting munich handwork, with luis unützer turning the oak bases. nina kirste's first solo show sehen followed in june, photographs of phenomena rather than objects. october paired two architects who had taught at the same faculty for years — gilberto botti and michael gaenßler, juxtaposition: canvas / construction — oil paintings alongside photographs of their own buildings, shown on screens without a single caption. november belonged to the academy: the class of prof. karin kneffel from munich's akademie der bildenden künste took over the space with twenty-one young artists — among them gregory borlein, whose sculptures are in our collection today. hanna klingseisen's randbereiche thought about textiles as the borders of the body; elisabeth biron von curland showed portraits.
and from mid-november to just before christmas, the space ran its most ambitious format: spazioweek, an interdisciplinary collective exhibition of art, design, music and food — where interior designers could apply for a niche of fifteen square metres to design as their own. the niches never really left. creative freelancers work from them today, and the members' club planned for late 2026 grows out of exactly that idea.
2024 — the loud year
the last full year started in january with something nobody expected from a design gallery: munich's first new year's sake festival, hosted with miyu matsuzaki, miss sake japan 2021, who lectured on the beauty of japan's four seasons and poured a bar of sake from prefectures most guests couldn't place on a map. february brought alessandro giorgi's lucid dream. in april the la marzocco roadshow stopped at the space — cuppings by suuapinga, a latte-art workshop with the german champion daniel gerlach, and a podium on munich's gastro scene between tradition and innovation. for creative business week in may, under the theme how to co-create with nature, maria cepissakova's ceramics stood beside levak design studio's flower bowls and studio von schoenebeck's flamed candle holders — and the new la marzocco coffee bar opened with platinum-glazed cups cepissakova had turned for the occasion.
the la marzocco roadshow, april 2024.
then june: christine schuhbeck's enter the void, the solo exhibition that defined our summer and remains the show people ask about first. around it, the courtyard was rarely quiet — the nunc. coffee machine roadshow, alaise's concept store evening with palm wine from togo, kora music from senegal and the ebony game adi from benin, yoga and breathwork between the artworks with taylor hass and marco miehling. and in august, calima specialty coffee moved in for the pop-up that ended up writing the space's next chapter for it.
what stayed
the public programme closed in early 2025 — the queue had won. but almost every designer in today's collection walked in through those four years: shown here, launched here, or introduced by someone who was. the niches from spazioweek became desks for freelancers. the archive of all 37 events, with photographs and detail pages, lives here — and the people behind them are on the designers page.