One can always claim this: the transition from dreaming to waking does not bring us the sensations that were already present in the dream; and after waking, illusions continue to persist (for example, one embroiders the mechanisms of awakening instead of embroidering a phantom). (Simone Weil)

Text as image and vice versa, the crumbling universality of the grid, a division that blurs flip-flops, tiled in I think of Adorno’s much-maligned essay on jazz and think: differences in quality everyone, over the course of their own work, occasionally makes a real blunder. I think about how familiarity with this Adorno quote has almost entered pop-cultural consciousness.

I think: what a time to be alive

When I am asked to write a text for the exhibition, I am in the process of clearing out the apartment of my recently deceased grandmother. I am stunned by the piles of cross-stitched tablecloths stacked in folds. Countless hours of craftsmanship, a trousseau, the woman’s entire pride. Cross-stitch and grid, I think:

logic of standardisation

I, who despite better judgment usually order my own shoes one size too small, read online: With the same model from the brand Florsheim Shoes, the US president has recently begun gifting his White House staff unprompted. I read that they are almost always too large. Whether this is because Trump, who enjoys guessing shoe sizes, misjudges them, or because of a male anxiety based on his claim that one can tell a lot about a man from his shoe size, remains unclear.

I think that the division into applied and fine arts has long since become obsolete to us; I think: a distribution of the sensible (Rancière) in lifestyle part-time, always doing two things at once, I think:

that the dissolution of aesthetic regimes threatens to be reversed in the authoritarian turn of politics, I think: logic of standardisation.

I think: what a time to be alive.

Anna-Sophie Berger (b. 1989, Vienna, Austria) is an artist living and working in Vienna and Berlin. She studied fashion design and transmedia art at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. She works across media, centering textiles and sculpture to examine how regimes of desire are materially structured across clothing, housing, and industrial production. Grounded in sustained study of historical and contemporary fine art, the work ultimately prioritizes visual and formal resolution over representational treatment of these concerns. She has had solo exhibitions at Art hall, Baltimore (2026); MAK, Vienna (2023); Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn (2020); Cell Project Space, London (2019); MUMOK, Vienna (2016); Kunsthaus Bregenz (2016); Ludlow 38, NY (2015); White Flag Projects, St. Louis (2015); and Belvedere21, Vienna (2014); among others. She has recently participated in group exhibitions at the Chicago Cultural Center, Chicago (2026); the Pictures Collection of the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna (2022); The Glucksman, Cork (2022); MACRO Museum, Rome (2021); MAK, Austria (2019); Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (2019);  Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem (2018); S.M.A.K., Ghent (2018); Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius (2018); KestnerGesellschaft, Hannover (2017); Kunstverein, Munich (2017). She is the recipient of the 2017 Ars Viva Fine Arts Prize in Germany and the 2016 Kapsch Contemporary Art Prize, Austria and a 2023 recipient of the Pollock Krasner grant.

Reinhard Voigt (*1940, Berlin) is a painter and ceramist whose work spans more than five decades. After initially training as a ceramicist, he studied painting under Gotthard Graubner, Gerhard Richter and David Hockney at the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg, where he developed the grid as a central element of his practice – a structure he has continued to explore throughout his career. Voigt’s paintings are often built from dense arrangements of small, colored squares, anticipating the visual logic of digital pixels long before their widespread use. Working between abstraction and figuration, he draws on sources ranging from (mostly his own) photography to everything else, creating a distinctive visual language that engages both German postwar painting and American Pop Art. After living for many years in the United States, Voigt returned to Berlin in 2017. His work has been presented in numerous exhibitions, including a comprehensive survey at the Neues Museum Nürnberg. His paintings are held in public and private collections including the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, Sammlung des Landes Baden-Württemberg, Wilhelm Hack Museum Ludwigshafen, and the Museum of Modern Art New York.

Text by Sophia Eisenhut
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