Kaspar Müller

Kaspar Müller’s Boutique Société × Treasures of Memory 2 exhibition at Société brings together objects with a past and a price: things that have absorbed, over time, the projections, desires, and contradictions of the cultures that made them. Two tents stand at the center of the exhibition. Provisional and portable, such humble architecture turns up everywhere, from street markets and trade fairs to birthday parties and black-tie events. Installed indoors, they become rooms, boutiques, aspirational stage sets for unruly, code-shifting objects. Lamp sculptures cast the warm light of a showroom or a home, their exuberant, discordant constellations of bulbs recycling the image of the old to fabricate the new. Hand-blown glass bongs, singular in their making, ubiquitous in their use, sit at the intersection of craft and mass production: vehicles for transformation of a state of mind. Hand-painted, cast aluminium tulips placed on miniature, paint-splattered chairs invoke both the history of flower painting and the original financial bubble: seventeenth-century Dutch “tulip mania,” when flower bulbs became objects of delirious speculation. A series of oil paintings completes the picture. Müller fed personal memories into an AI image generator—a childhood neighborhood, stolen cigarettes, a father’s antiquarian bookshop—and painted from the results: generic and oddly precise at once, intimate enough to sting and impersonal enough to estrange.