“CHRYSALIS” Installation by Gonzalo Borondo

Spanish artist Gonzalo Borondo is again blurring the lines between architecture and illusion, history and reinvention. With Chrysalis, his latest large-scale intervention, Borondo reskins the façade of Munich’s Villa Stuck into a luminous, multilayered vision of shadows and figures—tapping into a historical subconscious that reveals, conceals, and questions all at once. He covers over 600 square meters of mesh that are stretched across the museum’s scaffolding, his white and gold imagery a tattooed second skin, a veil that is both ephemeral and commanding.

Villa Stuck, once the home and studio of the German Symbolist painter Franz von Stuck, is in the midst of renovation. Rather than treating the construction as a disruption, Borondo makes it a canvas—an opportunity to engage with the site’s history. He draws selectively from von Stuck’s iconography, reinterpreting figures of fauns, centaurs, and Dionysian revelry with a contemporary eye. Here are the rigid dualities of von Stuck’s world, now proposed with a more fluid, layered masculinity reflective of contemporary conversations and study. The result is a work that shifts between past and present, tradition and transformation, and new narratives within an established visual language.

The title, Chrysalis, signals metamorphosis— with hints at something concealed yet in motion, a museum in flux, a city in transition. Borondo’s materials are chosen with purpose and maximize the possible options: paint applied to industrial netting, breathing with its environment, changing with light and weather, a living composition, shifting with each viewer’s angle.

Borondo’s practice has frequently sought and embraced the ephemeral. Known for his experiments with glass etching, shadow play, and interventions in urban spaces, his work defies easy categorization. Through monumental installations or delicate scratches in glass, he navigates the material and the immaterial, permanence and impermanence. In Munich, that approach finds a striking expression—an urban altar towering over Prinzregentenstrasse, honoring the Gesamtkunstwerk ethos that von Stuck championed while pushing its boundaries forward.

Chrysalis will remain in place through June 2025, a temporary presence that lingers in the mind long after it disappears.

The installation CHRYSALIS will be exhibited on the main façade of the Villa Stuck Museum of Munich (Prinzregentenstrasse 60) from February 8th until June 2025. Helena Pereña, Curator.

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