Karolin Braegger

Mortals & Models
28.05. - 25.07.2026

Karolin Braegger & Clara Mary Joy, Tailored, print and lazer cut on paper, 17 x 25 cm, Edition 1/30, 2026

Karolin Braegger & Clara Mary Joy, Tailored, print and lazer cut on paper, 17 x 25 cm, Edition 1/30, 2026

Karolin Braegger, Sketches, 2026, transfer print and pencil on paper, 100 x 185 x 65 cm

Karolin Braegger, Sketches, 2026, transfer print and pencil on paper, 100 x 185 x 65 cm, detail

Karolin Braegger, Slacker I, 2026, coated and dyed leathers, acrylic on stained MDF, dimesions variable
Karolin Braegger Slacker II, 2026, coated leathers, acrylic on stained MDF, dimesions variable

Karolin Braegger, Untitled, 2026, transfer print and pencil on canvas mounted on MDF, 30 × 40 cm

Karolin Braegger, Untitled, 2026, transfer print and pencil on canvas mounted on cardboard, 30 × 40 cm

Karolin Braegger, studio, 2026, edding on unpacked canvas, 30 x 40 x 4 cm

Karolin Braegger, Downward Dog, 2026, transfer print and pencil on paper, A3

Karolin Braegger, Fitting, 2026, transfer print and pencil on canvas mounted on cardboard, 30 x 40 cm

Karolin Braegger, Overwhelmed, 2026, charcoal on paper, A3

Karolin Braegger, Walking a Painting, 2026, transfer print and pencil on canvas mounted on MDF, 30 × 40 cm

Karolin Braegger, Untitled, 2026, transfer print and pencil on canvas mounted on MDF, 30 × 40 cm

Karolin Braegger, Shapewear, transfer print and pencil on canvas mounted on MDF, 30 x 40 cm

Karolin Braegger, One Picture Too High, 2026, transfer print and pencil on canvas mounted on MDF, 50 × 60 cm

Karolin Braegger, Cheeky Juggling Geek, 2026, honeycomb cardboard, CNC - cut, 18 x 216 x 4 cm

Karolin Braegger, Quaintrelle, 2026, coated leather, 115 x 185 cm

Karolin Braegger
1. Slacker III, 2026, coated leather, acrylic on stained MDF, dimesions variable
2. Querelle, 2026, dyed leather, acrylic on stained MDF, dimesions variable

Karolin Braegger, Soccer, 2026, transfer print and pencil on canvas mounted on MDF, 30 × 40 cm

Karolin Braegger, Untitled, 2026, transfer print on unprimed canvas, 30 × 40 cm

Karolin Braegger, contemplo, 2026, transfer print and pencil on canvas mounted on MDF, 30 × 40 cm

Karolin Braegger, Triangle, 2026, transfer print and pencil on MDF, 30 × 40 cm

Karolin Braegger, Sleeper, 2026, transfer print and pencil on canvas mounted on MDF, 30 × 40 cm

In a proliferating suite of drawings—works less fixed than iterable, susceptible to further mutation, reprise, deviation. Karolin Braegger stages the ongoing negotiation between a figure and the most elementary geometries: circle, triangle, rectangle, sphere, pyramid, cuboid. What appears, at first, almost pedagogical or diagrammatic soon loosens into something more mercurial. At times the figure seems to marshal these forms, arranging and mastering them with a provisional authority; elsewhere, control falters. Geometry slips its leash. Shapes acquire an obstinate autonomy, proliferating into scenes of excess, impasse, exhaustion.
Order gives way not exactly to chaos but to a kind of animated overdetermination, as though abstraction itself had become temperamental.

The exhibited drawings, together with the implication that they might continue indefinitely in altered permutations, insist on potentiality rather than completion. Each image behaves less as a resolved composition than as a notation toward further enactment. And because the drawings borrow something from the comic strip—its compressed dramaturgy, its elastic temporality, it remains undecidable whether one confronts a circle or a sphere, a triangle or a pyramid. Yet this ambiguity matters precisely because drawing arrives flatly, insistently planar, attached to the wall even when aspiring toward volume. The fiction of dimensionality is never fully stabilized.

Having studied fashion alongside fine art, Braegger repeatedly returns to questions of bodily contour, silhouette, shape, and dress. These concerns migrate into the sculptural works, where she has devised supporting structures from interlocking MDF panels: rudimentary armatures, almost theatrical in their economy. Draped across them are various leather hides. differently colored, coated, textured—resting, slumping, cascading. They function as coverings, skins, mantles. At moments they fall with an almost liquid grace; elsewhere they gather in inert folds, extending outward onto the floor. What emerges are bodies both sculptural and staged, constituted as much through concealment as through material presence. Here too, potentiality persists: flatness coaxed into three-dimensionality through simple means, a slotting system, a modest trick of construction that nevertheless produces an improbable corporeality.

Braegger’s titles deepen this unstable anthropomorphism. She frequently adopts terms conventionally reserved for human states or actions—conditions, gestures, affects, granting the geometric and sculptural assemblages an uncanny emotional weather. One encounters not objects exactly, but figures caught in situations.

In the work of the two cut-out faces stacked one above the other, absence becomes structural rather than theatrical. The forms suggest bodies and identities held in suspension, their missing features inviting projection without ever resolving into portraiture. By layering faces on face the piece stages fragmentation as a condition of embodiment itself: they remain incomplete, contingent on the viewer’s movement, perspective, and imaginative reconstruction.

Elsewhere, the collaboration with Clary Mary Joy, an edition for this exhibition, itself is interrupted by the possibility of pushing a figure outward from its surface: language is fragmented, punctured, confronted with its own lacunae. Likewise, the flyer containing the exhibition text may be torn into separate fragments and eventually recomposed. Reading becomes dispersal and reassembly; coherence appears only provisionally, after interruption. Meaning, like the bodies and geometries Braegger stages, remains contingent, partial, always in the process of being put back together.

Antonia Lia Orsi on notes of Sabina Gmür

Thank you to Sabina Gmür, Hanna Besenhard, Paul Igel, Nino Stelzl, Sophie Gogl, Iacopo Spini, Raphael Oberhuber, Tobias Kaspar, Milena Langer, Hansi Fuchs, Joseph Bourgois, Marina Sula, Clara Mary Joy, Valentina Triet, Jonida Laçi, Felix Schmidt, Lou-Anna Ulloa del Rio.