Rolf Julius: Music [under your feet] | exhibition

ExhibitionCella Gallery and Hovorny, Opava

Cella Gallery 17. 4. – 19. 6. 2025

Curator: Jakub Frank
In collaboration with: Maija Julius

When Rolf Julius first exhibited his photographic series Deichlinie (Dike Line) accompanied with recorded sound in 1980, he proposed a remarkable connection between the visible and the audible—a connection that became a central motif of his work and introduced a new sensitivity to what we call klangkunst, sound art, or sonic art in its various forms. The horizon shifts subtly in the individual photographs of Deichlinie, but remains static—until the sound of gentle ringing, first from the left speaker and then from the right, adds an illusion of movement to the work.

The relationship between the visual and the aural in Julius’s work is not one of synesthetic transfer in the style of early modernism, nor is it purely conceptual—a transfer between the seen and the thought. Rather, his work aligns with contemporary reflections on sound, silence, and everything in between, as formulated by John Cage, La Monte Young, and Morton Feldman. Julius’s intermediality lies in his ability to perceive sound as a visual material—with its own shape, structure, color, surface, hardness, or size—or as a space with its own expanse, depth, and atmosphere.

In his art, Julius was capable of becoming objects, environments, or colors. He could recognize the sound carried within a stone and translate it into a musical composition that seemed to emanate from within the stone itself. He succeeded in making places in the landscape resonate in such a way that they became music. In his installations, yellow sounded yellow and red sounded red—whether in our ears or just in our minds.

Music [under your feet] is the first exhibition of Rolf Julius in the Czech Republic. Yet traces of his presence can be found elsewhere. In the archive of Jiří Valoch are several works Julius gifted to Valoch and Milan Knížák. Knížák also writes (admiringly) of his encounter with Julius and his work in his memoirs. In 1982, at a time when Julius was still exploring the possibilities of a new artistic language, he performed in Brno at Valoch’s invitation, also presenting several of his drawings. It was here that Valoch introduced him to the then-emerging Brno art scene. One of Julius’s works is part of the Lidice Memorial collection, having entered it through the efforts of curator René Block in the late 1990s. A Czech translation of Julius’s key text Rooms of Stillness was published in 2023 in the exhibition catalogue Sites of Reverberation at 8smička.

The Deichlinie series, Julius’s first sound-based work, was exhibited in 1980 at Für Augen und Ohren, the most important sound art exhibition up to that time. Amidst a range of strong voices—sound conceptualists, performers, makers of sound objects and technological installations—Julius, then an emerging artist, could easily have been overlooked. Yet Deichlinie, for those paying close attention, must have already stood out for its quiet distinctiveness. Forty-five years later, we present the piece in Cella Gallery alongside other works from the 1980s and 1990s, illustrating the evolution of Julius’s practice—from works that explore the mutual influence of the visual and the auditory, through the “small sounds” embodied in tiny sound-producing objects, to his iconic hanging speakers.

All the works were selected in collaboration with the artist’s daughter Maija Julius, who manages the estate Rolf Julius and is responsible for the proper presentation of his work. We thank her sincerely for her invaluable collaboration and for the care and dedication she continues to give to Rolf Julius’s legacy.

The exhibition is supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic and the Statutory City of Opava.