Artists

Ida Ekblad, Hans Josephsohn, Simone Fattal, Gina Fischli, Jasmine Gregory, Wilhelm Sasnal, Meret Oppenheim, Ser Serpas, Monika Sosnowska, Erna Rosenstein, Paweł Althamer, Cezary Bodzianowski, Paulina Ołowska

Press release

The glasshouse signifies the gallery's environment — a static, borderline fragile space, occasionally impermeable to the outside. Under carefully maintained conditions, an equilibrium must be sustained, monitoring for any peculiar signs that may interfere with the setting. In the same way, the gallery's stability, accountability, and purpose depend on forces beyond its walls, shaped as much by external influences as by what it contains within. This exhibition brings together works shaped by control, intuition, and historical residue. It bridges approaches to artmaking and, fundamentally, the experience of the everyday, or a set of happenings that construct the viewer's encounter. Some of the works emerge from intimate forms of experimentation; others test a relation to the world, registering both the material demands of adjustment and the cultural fragility of the present. As the juxtapositions operate formally, they also signify concealed strains of history and contemporary discourse. Installed in sustained dialogue, the works ask what conditions make form possible: What circumstances produced them? How does memory enter the immediate? The presentation symbolically opens with the brass sculptures by Hans Josephsohn (1920 – 2012), an artist whose works mediate among the abstract, the formal, and the oblique. The viscid figures are allegories of Josephsohn's past relationships, portraying his encounters as stationary masses, sitting upright or partially lying on the pedestal. The two works are alert; they await instructions, a notice from the spectator, or the artist. This necessity for relationships lies at the core of Josephson's practice, where human substance is molded by the artist's bare hands. Seclusion was an inherent quality of Josephsohn's process — he would often cast the sculptures in solitude, with proximity to the portrayed. Confined, the sculptures are reduced to anonymous forms, appearing as intuitive monuments that are uncommunicative to their surroundings. Other significant figures include Meret Oppenheim (1913 – 1985) and Erna Rosenstein (1913 – 2004), artists embedded in Surrealism and communal rituals of Parisian cafès. Each was also shaped by the traumatic upheavals of the Second World War; the two artists approached the post-war condition in their own ways. As Rosenstein's assamblage emanates from the artist's political engagement, a constant search for an adequate idiom to encapsulate the poverty, modesty, and fragility of the tormented reality, Oppenheim's drawings test the language of Surrealism. While the bold, organic abstraction of Treibhaus, the exhibition's eponymous composition, aligns with Rosenstein's ink Cradle and the Surrealist undertone in general, the former's auto-portrait is a self-sufficient commentary on Oppenheim's reluctance to categorize any of her works. She established a condition that defied any classification, making her works contemporary manifestos of autonomy. Ser Serpas' work is equally reluctant to be categorized. Working with poetry, painting, performance, and sculpture, her practice stems from quotidian, mundane rituals and the collecting of objects; they echo the durability of the readymade, precisely discarded items, while remaining alert to the atmosphere of the present. Her works embrace bodily presence, uncovering the anatomy of the materials she uses. Such processes are visible in choreographed performances surrounding the debris she comes across, or in footprints on canvases she lays on the floor. Serpas' large-scale work presented here also emphasizes the gravity of the artist's methodology. Applying canvases on top of one another while the paint is still wet, the work deploys a poignant rule of repetition: every replication contains a difference, a shift that is barely visible. The smudged, blurred outlines that trap the bleary figure are memories subject to loss, delicately shifting, only keeping a mere silhouette in a constant retelling. The ordinary is also central to Ida Ekblad's practice, though in her work it appears without coherence or regularity. Drawing on folk art, fashion, refuse, and youth culture, among other sources, she works close to what is usually overlooked. Her attention turns to the margins of everyday life: to what is discarded, peripheral. Ekblad's painting encompasses a range of mediums and sources she collects through conversions and actions. Her transformations, reinterpretations, and reshaping are rubbed against a few materials — the dichotomy of the triptych signifies her autonomy and, as Ekblad states, her tradition of "painting with materials that aren't meant for painting". The sand-cast bronze, meanwhile, operates as a direct and grounded action, released from any confining theoretical frame. Distortion as a conscious act is also revealed in Wilhelm Sasnal's painting, a portrait embedded in a jug. Working with a plethora of sources, Sasnal's deformation of familiarity is subject to quick interpretations, derived from observations and commentaries. As the asymmetrical face embeds itself in the formless vessel, the painting becomes an odd, concentrated gesture, gathering references only to push it toward abstraction. The sculpture by Simone Fattal, born in 1942 in Damascus, sustains an open relation to history, informed in part by her past as an archaeology student in Paris. Quoting Liberty Adrien, Fattal's works "engage in a rigorous process of excavation, much like an archeologist uncovering buried artifacts or a scholar deciphering layers of meaning in poetry". Their inspiration is drawn from mythology and literature, from religious tales to the artist's nostalgia for her homeland, Syria. The ceramic work, analogous to a destroyed landscape, is a force conceived from a mystery surrounding the past, simultaneously shaping our present — it is a remnant that fossilizes the artist's memory. On the other hand, recollection also lays the foundation for Paulina Ołowska's practice, which operates through collective nostalgia and individual research. Working with an array of archives, Ołowska tests the past through the contemporary lens. Portraying a worker from the communist reality in a "poor but sexy" aesthetic, the painting situates memory as an area of desire, control, and fascination. As with Ołowska, appropriation and desire also characterize the practice of Jasmine Gregory, whose sculptures are tangible examinations of consumer discourse and embodiments of excess. Working with contradictions within capitalist systems, paradox and satire serve as apparatuses for contemplating these patterns. Gregory is captivated by "a certain lack of meaning". The titles of the works, for example, I Don't Want to Be Cremated. I Want My Body to Be Stuffed Like Chanel's First Bag, imbued with material nihilism — the rhinestones, hair, and glitter are attached to a hollow shoebox that feels simultaneously alluring, ironic, and bleak. As commentaries on our present condition, Paweł Althamer's ceramics oscillate between reality and representation, portraits of everyday situations, and the artist's unorthodoxy. His sculptures are the result of observations; The food delivery courier is an extension of the outside world, noticed by the artist as he explores the urban realm. The ceramic self-portrait also delivers the artist's spiritual attitude towards himself — Althamer shapes his reality with the aid of the subconscious, fortifying a raw, emotional landscapes that reflect the inner worlds of those portrayed. Emerging from a younger generation, Gina Fischli's works contrast with the rigid ceramics of Althamer's figures, being quieter and featuring socially undervalued affects. Influenced by her early work in stage design, Fischli's compact sculptures employ materials and aesthetics associated with craft and decoration. Banal subjects, such as an ashtray, extend to the object's status itself, whilst the animals, cast in plaster and layered with patchworks, suggest a world shaped by dependency and projection. The almost-hallucinatory creatures examine human-animal relationships that may evolve into forms of desire; they brush against reality and tangible, satisfying yet uncanny experiences. The marginal triviality of the objects resonates with the work by Cezary Bodzianowski, whose practice unfolds through understated gestures that quietly infiltrate everyday reality. Like Fischli, his installation reveals overlooked contexts and exposes the contradictions embedded in familiar habits and clichés — patterns so ingrained that they typically pass unnoticed. The exhibition concludes with Monika Sosnowska's new sculpture, a straight, vertical structure that stands atop the gallery's terrace. Originating from an earlier work that captured the subtle impression of Sosnowska's hand on a door handle, this piece extends that intimate gesture into space. A long, slender aluminum rod — cast from the artist's hand grip — rises from a raw concrete base. The pole's verticality conveys both fragility and strength, marking the space through its presence and a subtle resistance. Positioned outside, the sculpture is an extension of the gallery's frame, echoing Sosnowska's captivation with architectural fabrics and urban archaeologies. Presented as part of this year's Constellations initiative, the exhibition is the result of a collaborative partnership with Karma International, Zurich.