The two artists, Meuser and Noemi Pfister, who are nearly 45 years apart in age, might be asked: Wo stehst du mit deiner Kunst, Kolleg*? (Where do you stand with your art, colleague?)

This question, which also serves as the title of the exhibition, is a line from a painting by Pfister and originates from a work by Jörg Immendorff made in 1973. A work that captures a dilemma with precision: can an artist’s studio practice be of any relevance when the world outside is in turmoil?

Noemi Pfister takes up this question and presents, in the exhibition, a series of new small-format paintings that offer a keyhole view into the art world.

At the centre are two familiar figures drawn from her childhood: Krtek (known in the German version as Pauli), the little mole from the Czech animated series, and Pumuckl, the red-haired mischievous goblin from the German children’s book series Meister Eder und sein Pumuckl.

Pfister stages these characters as artists, collectors and visitors engaging directly with wellknown works from art history, bringing the mechanisms of the art world into focus with humour.

Ne Travaillez Jamais shows Pauli exhausted on the sofa of his studio; Precarious Working Conditions depicts an artist leaving the studio to attend to his day job – and between these, Pumuckl contentedly contemplating a newly acquired work.

With a light touch, Pfister asks what it means to make and show art, and how the standards by which it is judged are set.

Meuser, by contrast, approaches the same question from a different generation and with different means. He studied in Joseph Beuys’s class at the Düsseldorf Academy, at a time when the question of art’s social relevance was so pressing that artmaking itself nearly came to a standstill. Jörg Immendorff’s Hört auf zu malen (Stop Painting) struck precisely that nerve.

Meuser’s response was not programmatic but pragmatic: to push back against pathos, to pull things back into the frame of reality.

Working with found objects from scrap yards – objects of unclear function and a life of their own – he made his way toward art. Every day, concretely, and without grand gestures. His sculptures play with meaning without laying a claim to ‘enlightenment’. What is left is an art that remains grounded: laconic, humorous and quietly uncompromising.

Two attitudes that mirror each other: Pfister answers the question with affectionate self-irony, directed outwards towards the mechanisms of the art world. Meuser answers it inwardly, into his own practice, into the material.

Meuser comes from the same generation and scene as Jörg Immendorff.

Noemi Pfister, nearly 45 years his junior, is today the same age that Immendorff was when he painted Wo stehst du mit deiner Kunst, Kollege?

In Basel, the two artists are shown together for the first time.