ART MÛR BERLIN

On now

• In the objects that surround us, there are functions that time has rendered obsolete, stories hidden beneath the surface. A forgotten meaning, an interrupted gesture, a material that still bears the memory of a past use. Chairs, magnets, pieces of plastic, scraps of rubber… all familiar elements which, when torn from their context, seem to elude their own definition. The exhibition Triangulations is part of this practice of reconfiguration, like a space where points of reference shift. Much like parallax–that shift in perspective which transforms what we thought was stationary–Ginette Legaré’s work is built upon the instability of perspectives. Here, the object reveals itself and then eludes us. We must therefore learn to observe it differently: to move closer, move further away, circle round it, seek an angle that did not yet exist. In this case, looking is not synonymous with recognising. Legaré is interested in found or salvaged objects and the systems of meaning to which they belong. These discarded materials are thus diverted from their original context and brought together according to different logics, like fragments of a language to be reinvented. What was once intended to assemble, support, close, suspend or contain is thus imbued with a new purpose: that of lending itself to unexpected encounters. However, these encounters (and their interpretations) remain in a state of constant flux. For example, the work Parallactic literally plays on the variation in the viewer’s perspective: constructed from reclaimed wood and a metal fastener, the object appears to change depending on the position from which it is viewed. Perception thus becomes a material in its own right, as malleable as the elements that make up the works. The titles themselves also seem to play a part in these shifts. Either/Or, Under Erasure, As it turns out, From end to end, Upstaged: through suggestion, language becomes, in a sense, an additional material, opening up new possibilities for interpretation. This focus on the gaze ties in with a memory that continues to linger in the artist’s mind: that of a time when understanding the world meant, first and foremost, observing it, before the explanations and knowledge of others came to define its contours. Through this way of approaching the unknown, everything (and its possibilities) thus remains open, undefined. Legaré’s approach remains imbued with this initial openness. Her assemblages seek not so much to resolve the enigmas they raise as to allow them to unfold. For her, this element of uncertainty is not an obstacle; it is a space. Her practice reflects a tactile and intellectual curiosity that prioritises detours over categorical answers and lingers where things cease to be self-evident. Beyond being a series of playful and unconventional constructions, Triangulations functions as a genuine succession of perceptual situations, within which multiple interpretations can coexist. By transforming the ordinary without ever erasing it completely, the artist brings forth a different perspective–not necessarily a more accurate one, but a new one. And in that slight shift of the gaze, the world, for a moment, regains a touch of mystery.
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  Ginette Legaré : Triangulations

  Until 31 Oct 2026

  
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• There is something both alluring and ominous about Brigitte Radecki’s latest group of paintings. On each square support, flat, luminous panes of a singular hue—red, green, yellow, blue—appear to float over, slide under, and butt against one another with varying degrees of force. The forms are clearly defined, but their spatial relations are uncertain: will they hold, or shift in the next instant? This sense of potential, of aliveness, is heightened by the optical interactions of carefully calibrated saturations and values. I find myself experiencing something like landscape: the shifting effects of light and atmosphere on perception. There is no “outside” to the forms on the painting, no background to the foreground, and no illusion of separation between image and me. The paint surfaces are almost smooth; if I look at them from just the right angle, with the light raking across the surface, I see the rigour of Radecki’s paint handling as well as the subtle irregularities that come from making with a human hand. I feel close to the paintings, perhaps too close. I instinctively step away. There is a compelling paradox at the heart of Radecki’s approach. She establishes precise conditions for chance and then relinquishes control over what those conditions produce. She haphazardly folds a sheet of construction paper, drops it on the floor, photographs the resulting form, and uploads the digitally transformed image to her computer. She then translates this accidental configuration through an extended process of looking, mixing, adjusting, and painting, layer by layer, in thin washes of pigment. The quick, offhand event that begins the process becomes something slow, drawn out, meditative, and precise: a patiently executed painting whose final appearance could not have been predicted from the process that produced it. Even before reading the titles—Burning 25, Sliding Soil, The Sky is Falling, It Was a Dark and Stormy Night, Greenhouse, and Aftermath—I sensed a portentousness in the works. The titles allude to events: fire, moving earth, a storm, heat trapped in an atmosphere, and what remains after something has happened. They connect me to the world in which I live, and to the uncertainty that increasingly pervades it. In the context of our changing climate, this uncertainty feels particularly charged. The old sublime placed us before the overwhelming power of nature: the mountain, the ocean, the storm. These paintings lead me somewhere else. Their power does not come from grandeur but from uncertainty—from a world in which events unfold through systems too complex to see in their entirety, and whose consequences cannot be fully predicted. We are not simply spectators standing outside these systems; we are implicated in them, even as we struggle to comprehend their effects. Radecki’s paintings ask me to remain in the space between knowing and not knowing, between accident and intention, between beauty and apprehension, between event and aftermath.
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  Brigitte Radecki : It Was a Dark and Stormy Night

  Until 31 Oct 2026

  
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• Shades of Saturation // A Prismatic Antarctica Text by Isabelle Gapp Ice crystals form, freeze, melt, and dissolve; open water courses past the floe edge; icebergs drift along the horizon, their hazy underbellies buried deep in the waves; and new snowflakes are caught up in the frenzy of a blizzard. Water moves and transforms; its materiality cannot be fixed in place. For Jessica Houston, the material realities of Antarctica’s waters saturate the film, photographic prints and monochromatic paintings that make up Water, Water Everywhere. By focusing on the permeability of water, Houston destabilises long-held notions of Antarctica as a place that is pristine, fixed and available to imperial visions of conquest and extraction. Throughout Water, Water Everywhere, colour saturates the senses. Melody Jue and Rafico Ruiz write of “saturation,” where multiple phenomena and senses occur and confound simultaneously. Houston’s Antarctica is similarly saturated: ice crystals melt on a macro lense, casting prisms of light. A prismatic Antarctica. Snowflakes are in themselves prisms, crystal facets that grow and melt together. As if viewed through a microscope, the fractal lines of the snowflake are further captured in isolated paintings; blue, yellow, white, crimson pink and red. Colour is at once symbolic and material. A glowing, sun-like yellow rises over a digital photograph of a cluster of icebergs; this same colour is almost necrotic when transposed over footage of historic whaling. Elsewhere, a crimson red, made of microplastics, submerges mythical creatures; this is “Coleridge’s ominous crimson sea,” as Houston describes. Water, pollution and plastic seep into one another. Pigments made from plastic and liquid waste—PFAS, polystyrene, carbon, Styrofoam, microplastics—are also presented in Victorian-style glass apothecary jars. Now contained, these same colours stain fabric stretched around oversize, geometric wooden frames. These colours are seductive, but their material origins are not innocent. Colour and materiality collapse distances between places and times, connecting the apparently pristine waters of Antarctica to the human-made pollutants that circulate through them. Elsewhere, fissures, cracks and lines mark the icy surface like scratches on a glass plate. As snowflakes take shape in a series of gelatin silver prints, they not only hark back to earlier nineteenth-century photographic practices, but they also return us to the material processes of image-making itself. Imperfections in the image make the snowflakes appear almost microscopic; other microorganisms dance across this frozen realm. The materiality of the print carries with it the memory of water, through the liquid, chemical emulsion central to its process. Throughout, Houston embraces imperfection. Where lines and blemishes mark the gelatin silver print of an albatross, in a digital print the soaring albatross is juxtaposed by the diagonal of the slanted horizon. A crooked view over an open sea. These distortions or “glitches,” as Houston describes them, alter our perception of the frozen continent. Rather than simply reproducing the visual conventions through which Antarctica has historically been made knowable, Houston unsettles them. We have largely constructed a singular narrative of the polar worlds, one of vast, never-ending whiteness, where “aesthetic awe and moral transcendence” are projected onto the landscape. Houston’s Antarctica is instead imperfect, saturated and materially entangled: its ice becomes water, its colours become pollutants, and its images refuse to remain fixed.
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  Jessica Houston : Water, Water, Everywhere | Nor Any Drop to Drink

  Until 31 Oct 2026

  
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