Kirchgasse (kg), 03.09.2016 (Steckborn), is an art gallery located on the shores of Lake Constance, near the Swiss-German border, in the periphery of Zurich, Munich, and Stuttgart.

With the vision of bringing international art and specific discourses to the Thurgau shoreline of Lake Constance, Erich Hausammann and Leo Lencsés founded the Kirchgasse gallery in Steckborn in 2016. Following the deliberate decision to establish a gallery in a small town, away from metropolitan art scenes, Kirchgasse developed over the following years into an insider tip—a crossroads and meeting point for artists, curators, collectors, and art enthusiasts seeking specially curated and explicitly selected exhibitions.

In its early years, the gallery presented a mix of established positions such as Peter Kamm and André Butzer, younger positions such as Cédric Eisenring, Sarah Lehnerer, and Maximiliane Baumgartner, as well as historical positions including Mary Bauermeister, Pierre Klossowski, and Ulrike Ottinger. A key factor in the exhibition concepts was always to establish a connection to the place and the Lake Constance region. The ambition behind the exhibitions was to create a balance between art and context, urban and rural, painting and text, the regional and the international, the poetic and the systemic, the material and the conceptual—between image and practice, atmosphere and installation.

In 2019, Anne Gruber took over Leo Lencsés’s role as program director, and in 2022 she assumed sole leadership of the gallery from Erich Hausammann. She continued to develop the program with consistency, supported new artists, and focused on sharpening the gallery’s existing focal points. Since 2019, the exhibitions have revealed clearly interwoven thematic threads that connect an interest in critical-philosophical and feminist painting practices with conceptual precision, site-specific installation, and an engagement with social conditions, as well as art education and institutional critique.

These lines of inquiry have been evident in numerous substantial solo exhibitions—such as those by Séverine Heizmann, Evelyn Plaschg, Birgit Megerle, Philipp Simon, and Julia Dubsky—as well as in thematic and experimental group exhibitions such as Constellations in a Bubble, I am See, and Didactic Poetry. Since 2026, Stefan Burger, Chantal Kaufmann, and Philipp Schwalb have joined the Kirchgasse organizational team. Together, they aim to develop a gallery model capable of responding to the demands of contemporary artistic discourse, economic dynamics, and social conditions.

Operating and consciously shaping a gallery far from the center—on the shore, at the border, and in the periphery—has defined Kirchgasse’s conceptual orientation and exhibition history over the past decade. Based on this experience of being a liminal space, Kirchgasse seeks to emphasize and explore the liminality of the gallery itself. A liminal space is a space of transition, where boundaries are crossed and exchange is made possible. The gallery thus becomes a place where art is presented and discourses are proposed; where the artistic and the commercial, the social and the individual, the conceptual and the experimental, the regional and the international, the mediating and the immediate, the poetic and the functional can meet and support one another.