(En) Throughout the exhibition, Soft Displacements, bodies appear fragmented, folded, suspended or partially contained. Architectural structures soften into organic forms, while domestic objects and fragile materials acquire emotional and symbolic weight. Ceramic surfaces resemble shells, wounds or ruins; wire structures evoke both protection and constraint; fabrics become skins, membranes or thresholds; landscapes drift toward bodily and psychological states. Rather than escaping reality, the works …
(En) Throughout the exhibition, Soft Displacements, bodies appear fragmented, folded, suspended or partially contained. Architectural structures soften into organic forms, while domestic objects and fragile materials acquire emotional and symbolic weight. Ceramic surfaces resemble shells, wounds or ruins; wire structures evoke both protection and constraint; fabrics become skins, membranes or thresholds; landscapes drift toward bodily and psychological states. Rather than escaping reality, the works gathered in Soft Displacements reveal the subtle instability already embedded within familiar forms, spaces and systems of orientation.
The exhibition unfolds through a vocabulary of vulnerable presences and permeable structures. Materials such as felt, textile, ceramic, plaster, graphite and wire recur throughout the space, producing shifting relations between softness and containment, intimacy and exposure, organic growth and architectural control. Across painting, sculpture and installation, forms seem caught in moments of transition: neither fully stable nor fully dissolved, neither entirely domestic nor entirely estranged.
The exhibition unfolds through a vocabulary of vulnerable presences and permeable structures. Materials such as felt, textile, ceramic, plaster, graphite and wire recur throughout the space, producing shifting relations between softness and containment, intimacy and exposure, organic growth and architectural control. Across painting, sculpture and installation, forms seem caught in moments of transition: neither fully stable nor fully dissolved, neither entirely domestic nor entirely estranged.
In Miriam Cahn’s aufaugenhöhe, 16.07.2015 (2015), a solitary figure appears pressed against an undefined threshold, its raised hands suspended between exposure, defence and contact. Reduced to a fragile graphite presence, the body becomes emotionally immediate yet psychologically inaccessible, oscillating between intimacy and estrangement.
Nearby, Eva Kotatkova’s works from the series Me, dispersed in the room (or Room for flexible bodies) (2016) transform bodily structures into skeletal wire frameworks that appear simultaneously protective and constraining. Limbs, cages and absent anatomies remain partially suspended in space, suggesting systems designed to contain, discipline or support the body while exposing its fragility. This tension extends into the textile works and drawings presented in the exhibition, where stitched forms, pierced surfaces, fragmented creatures and soft contours evoke emotional states suspended between childhood imagination, vulnerability and latent anxiety.
The works of Santiago de Paoli introduce a more intimate and ambiguous symbolic language. In paintings such as No Moon (2020), Solo and Bricks (2020) and Summerfall (2020), bodies, landscapes and domestic elements merge into psychologically unstable environments rendered through muted tones and soft felt surfaces. Meanwhile, works such as Die Blaue Brücke (2024) or The treeslookblue (2024) oscillate between landscape, object and face-like apparition, balancing childlike simplicity with quiet unease. Across the selection, ordinary motifs gradually lose stable meaning and drift toward emotional or subconscious associations.
Working through subtle material tensions, Katinka Bock’s sculptures appear as residual or eroded presences within the exhibition space. In L-lemonsole (2018), the bronze form resembles at once a fish, a fragment or a trace left behind, while Parole II (2021) introduces a sharp ceramic structure whose serrated contour evokes language, rupture or incomplete architecture. Refusing monumentality, these works remain attentive to gravity, proximity and material resonance, quietly altering the spatial rhythm of the exhibition.
For Isa Melsheimer, architecture appears as a porous and unstable organism. Works such as Larvae I (2021), Metamorphosis (Pierre-Louis Faloci, Maison Rouge) (2021) and Slow-Moving Architecture I (2023) transform modernist structures into hybrid ceramic bodies seemingly undergoing processes of mutation, erosion or organic overgrowth. This instability extends into her gouaches, where architectural spaces dissolve into dreamlike landscapes populated by oversized suns, vegetal fragments and displaced interiors. Rather than functioning as stable shelters, Melsheimer’s architectures become fragile psychological environments permeable to memory, fiction and decay.
Across Soft Displacements, bodies, objects and architectures never fully settle into fixed identities or functions. Instead, the exhibition proposes a mode of attention attuned to moments in which familiar structures begin to drift, opening subtle passages between the material, the emotional and the imagined.