“Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image” is a challenge that man cannot actually meet. We are dependent on images and descriptions if we want to illustrate a thing. Theinert, however, shows the viewer quite magnificently how the ‘non-image’ becomes art, the actual, the unspoken, via the ephemeral of the representational.”

Gabriele Loges, Schwäbische Zeitung, 2012

Play Video

“In a New Light – Mozart’s Requiem”
St. Martha, Nuremberg, 2021

Eliot Quartet
violin: Maryana Osipova
violin: Alexander Sachs
viola: Dmitry Hahalin
violoncello: Michael Preuss
visual piano: Laurenz Theinert

As an anniversary project, an intermedial concert is being created in Nuremberg. The famous Requiem by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is an opulent, downright legendary musical celebration of the dead. In St. Martha’s, this great and grand work resounds in a reduced, crystalline way, like an essence of sound and faith. Peter Lichtenthal (1778-1853) created a version for string quartet only, without words, in the early 19th century. The Eliot Quartet – currently on its way to the chamber music Olympus – will interpret this work together with light artist Laurenz Theinert. Theinert has developed a visual piano, a light organ, with which he makes Mozart’s sounds visible in space.
This Requiems performance is more than a sensational, intermedial concert event. This performance in all its emotional and spiritual depth dimensions is something like the DNA of a festival for sacred music – especially in the face of the Corona pandemic.

LUNA Leeuwarden, 2024
Phil Mills, electronic music
Laurenz Theinert, visual piano

Laurenz Theinert creates media art using 360° panoramic projections. To allow his work to communicate spontaneously with other participating artists (musicians and dancers), he invented the unique instrument Visual Piano together with Philipp Rahlenbeck. The light fills the space, like music fills a room. As soon as visitors enter the space, they become part of the work. Slowly, familiar spatial orientation patterns disappear and a space without perceptible boundaries is created with music and light. 

EVI Lichtungen 2024
Light Art Biennale Hildesheim
Hildesheim Cathedral

Michael ÄŒulo, organ
Laurenz Theinert, visual piano

Sound and light combine to create ever new forms. The moving light sculptures that Kurt Laurenz Theinert improvises live throughout the room with his unique ‘visual piano’ expand its dimensions to the point of boundlessness. Space, light and sound thus form a fascinating synthesis. Cathedral cantor Michael ÄŒulo played along.

“Klang Raum Zion”

Zion Church Berlin, 2018
Moderation: Sandra Maischberger
Dominik Sustek: organ (live from St. Peter Cologne)
Laurenz Theinert: visual piano (live on site)

On the occasion of the intermedial kick-off event of the project KlangRaumZion on October 4, 2018, light artist Kurt Laurenz Theinert illuminated the entire church space of the Zionskirche in a space-filling light performance. Using his specially developed Visual Piano, he modulated spontaneous, dynamic light drawings in real time and projected them into the space. Fine lines of light scanned the walls and condensed into moving networks. Lines and surfaces merged into pulsating patterns of psychedelic colors and crystalline shapes. A rush of shapes and colors that made the church space appear different at every moment. Every moment of the performance arose directly from the interaction with Dominik Susteck’s organ music, which was transmitted live from the Kunst-Station Sankt Peter Köln to the Zionskirche.

21st CENTURY GUITAR Conference
Dominion Chalmers Church Ottawa, 2019
Laurenz Theinert: visual piano

It was my pleasure and honor to contribute with my projections to these amazing compositions of contemporary guitar music at the 2019 Ottawa Conference. My apologies to Christopher Mayo, Craig Visser, Drake Andersen, Derek Cooper, Yu-chun Chien, Max Grafe and Ben Wylie for having to edit the compositions for this video.

“The Reelkirchen Project”
Light art walk Reelkirchen, 2020
Timber Hanfreich: sound collages
Laurenz Theinert: visual piano

RESPONSIVE Festival
St. David Church, Hallifax, 2016

Laurenz Theinert improvises patterns on 360° projection surfaces. He generates abstract graphic structures – dots and lines, colors and shapes – and choreographs their reflections in space. For this performance, he was assisted by Lukas Pearse to complement the interplay of space and time. The entire church of St. David became a resonating body for the frequencies of light and sound.

Laurenz Theinert: “Playing is a completely abstract process for me, there is no conceptual thought, no guiding idea and no applied meaning, I just want to explore the dynamics and aesthetics of the interconnectedness of light, space, time, the music and me.”

Presenting Partners:
Art Gallery of Nova Scotia
Dalhousie University: Dalhousie Art Gallery
Nova Scotia College of Art and Design: Anna Leonowens Gallery

Curatorial Collective:
Melanie Colosimo: Anna Leonowens Gallery at NSCAD University [Director].
Peter Dykhuis: Dalhousie Art Gallery [director].
Sarah Fillmore: Art Gallery of Nova Scotia [chief curator].
Bettina Pelz: curator specializing in light in the visual arts [RESPONSIVE artistic director]
Ralf Seippel: Art Gallery Seippel [RESPONSIVE Initiative with Juergen Probst]

FREIRAUM Festival
Holy Cross Church Leipzig, 2017
Schmeichel and Markus Horn: sound
Laurenz Theinert: visual piano

The so-called Visual Piano, a mixture of piano and MIDI controller, allows the artist Kurt Laurenz Theinert from Stuttgart to generate primarily non-representational forms in real time, whose 360-degree projection immerses the entire room in a sea of form and color. In the interplay with the musician Schmeichel, the tempo and complexity of image and sound increase, thus creating a multi-sensory condensation of space, sound and matter.

“Serial Light”
Hospital Church Stuttgart, 2017
Michael Sattelberger: organ
Laurenz Theinert: visual piano

“Licht/Klang//Raum”
Sonnenberg Church, 2016
Tobias Wittmann: organ
Laurenz Theinert: visual pianoo