The historic Völklingen Ironworks, a UNESCO World Heritage site in Germany, is hosting a groundbreaking exhibition titled "X-Ray: The Power of the X-Ray Vision" that explores the profound connections between technology and art since the discovery of X-rays 130 years ago. The exhibition, displayed across eighteen chapters in the colossal industrial cathedral of the world heritage blast furnace hall, commemorates Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen's revolutionary discovery at the University of Würzburg in November 1895.
The exhibition demonstrates how X-rays granted humanity an almost divine ability to see inside bodies and objects without physically opening them, fulfilling an ancient human dream while also conferring tremendous power. This god-like perspective of all-penetrating vision has fascinated artists and scientists alike, leading to an integral connection between the technology's potential and the significance of precise, artistic observation.
Artists have long sought to peer into people's souls or reveal invisible elements like auras through their work, much like X-rays make the unseen visible. The exhibition features a copy of the Turin Shroud, likely painted in medieval times, which presents Christ in X-ray-like appearance with prominent ribs captured in the canonical black-and-white colors of the technology. Medieval dances of death and vanitas representations similarly looked through external appearances and social status to reveal the underlying skeleton.
The exhibition opens with Leonardo da Vinci's anatomical drawing "Great Lady" from 1509, displayed alongside a Berlin artist Jens Harder's X-ray comic and an unsettling X-ray image of three poker cheaters by Nick Veasey. Leonardo's anatomical drawings naturally expose the innermost aspects of human beings, as did Edvard Munch, who appears in multiple sections with his tuberculosis and soul paintings.
While X-ray images have historical precedents, they gained immediate presence in art and developed a future that continues today, becoming increasingly futuristic. Just two years after Röntgen's discovery, English director George A. Smith created a short film featuring a skeleton couple sitting on a park bench – him drinking, her holding a similarly skeletal umbrella with visible metal ribs – while an X-ray camera points at them from the side. What started as lovingly hand-painted skeletons on black costumes soon evolved into actual X-ray films.
The ultimate voyeuristic metaphor of the X-ray vision that could see under skirts and dresses extends into current pornographic productions. In comics, which receive their own dedicated chapter, Superman possesses a god-like penetrating vision, causing his foster mother in the Superboy story to sigh that she cannot hide anything from him, just as a school friend cannot hide her new silicone breasts from Supergirl.
The X-ray exhibition fits perfectly into the environment of what was once Europe's largest steel plant due to the complex's seductive mixture of former high technology that simultaneously appears as futuristic large-scale sculpture and the concrete use of X-rays for material testing of steel and examining the diseased lungs of foundry workers. Media artist Christoph Brech has transformed the cynical saying from that era – "The lung is the blast furnace of the worker, and the blast furnace is the lung of the factory" – into a breathtaking monumental glass window featuring dozens of completely blackened lung lobes from Völklingen workers, which will remain there after the exhibition ends.
This installation illustrates that during tuberculosis times, the most frequently X-rayed organ varied as individually as a fingerprint. However, the triumph of radiation was soon followed by a break for health reasons, as not only Anna Bertha, Röntgen's wife and first test subject whose iconic hand portrait with wedding ring is displayed, developed cancer, but thousands of others did as well. Wax molds of radiation-burned faces and photos of hands disfigured by dermatitis document this, along with a photograph of a French X-ray assistant from the tuberculosis-plagued World War I wearing a thick lead apron and a curiously medieval-looking lead helmet.
In the chapter on radiation in politics and history, visitors find John Heartfield's anti-Nazi posters like "Adolf, the Superman: Swallows Money and Talks Trash," where Hitler's body is illuminated and thereby revealed as hollow except for the bribe money thrown in, similar to Fritz Kahn's "Man as Industrial Palace" from 1926. One doctor sarcastically explains a political spinal curvature through the eternal "Heil Hitler" greetings. It remains shocking how unjust systems like East Germany not only X-rayed Western visitors' cars at border crossings but also exposed regime opponents to dangerously strong doses for marking purposes and outside their homes.
Regarding genuinely artistic aspects of the technology, it particularly helps with artists' self-portraits. Frida Kahlo portrayed herself in 1944's "The Broken Column" with a corset, nails, and an Ionic column replacing her spine internally to capture the devastation of her horrific accident nineteen years earlier. Isa Genzken shows herself in a triptych during alcohol abuse, while Meret Oppenheim presents herself in her 1964 self-portrait "X-Ray of M.O.'s Skull" not with a fur cup but with striking earrings in profile. Jürgen Klauke contributes a modern variant of vanitas still life with his X-ray profile.
Wim Delvoye surpasses these quasi-religious searches for soul and essence of persons by erecting a real small Gothic chapel made of steel on the tile floor of the industrial cathedral, whose pointed arch windows consist of Goya-esque X-ray images. Current Völklingen director Ralf Beil presents a surprising, relatively recent thesis based on Beatriz Colomina's 2019 publication that Bauhaus buildings should be understood as X-ray architecture, insofar as their main characteristic of glass transparency stems from the idea of healthily illuminated offices, hospitals, and Magic Mountain sanatoriums.
Compelling evidence includes Mies van der Rohe's 1921 competition entry for an office high-rise on Friedrichstraße, which actually stands like an X-ray patient with glass ribs and spine on the banks of the Spree River. Similar light-filled architecture supporting this thesis can be found in works by Alvar Aalto, Richard Neutra, Albert Kahn, and William Ganster's Lake County Tuberculosis Sanatorium.
The diagnosis toward the end reveals that only four percent of what exists in the universe is visible to unaided eyes, with the vast remainder only visualizable through technical assistance such as X-rays, once again revealing humanity's ancient dream of quasi-divine vision enhanced by technology. It appears as a historical irony that the European X-ray telescope satellite eROSITA has been floating disabled in space since 2022 due to Russia's war of conquest, as the small car-sized device was cost-effectively built on the Russian Navigator platform. This represents yet another instance where power and vision converge through the medium of X-rays.
The exhibition "X-Ray: The Power of the X-Ray Vision" runs at Völklingen Ironworks until August 16, 2026, with a catalog to follow.
