Weaving is my main medium of artistic expression. I am fascinated by the sculptural potential of textiles: the fluid transition between the second and the third dimension, the mutability of form. For me, creating textiles is a form-finding process, where structure, material and space influence and shape one another.
What is calm today?
Not as wellness. Not as retreat. But as a method. As a position. As a form of resistance against acceleration, overproduction, and permanent visibility.
Ursula Wagner’s works begin precisely here. They are not loud. They are not illustrative. They are not image. They are presence.
For this exhibition, two new categories were created in the gallery’s archive: Paper and Textile. This is not an administrative footnote, but a curatorial insight: in Wagner’s practice, material is not a carrier. It is content. It is structure. It is an event.
Wagner produces her textile works using industrial weaving machines. Looms follow a hidden system: binary code, zeros and ones, shaping the inherent structure of the cloth. This may sound like technology, industry, functionality. But what happens when this logic is not used for efficiency, but for sensitivity? When code is understood not as control, but as choreography?
Wagner does not program images. She programs behavior.
How does textile respond to space?
How does textile respond to light?
How does fabric respond to gravity?
This “fluid transition” is central. Wagner is not interested in surface. She is interested in the moment something shifts: from flatness into volume, from ornament into object, from textile into a sculptural situation.
The exhibition shows works created between 2016 and 2026. The ‘sculptiles” series from 2016 speaks a language of fragility: fine, vulnerable, almost unprotected—as if too much attention could already change it. The 2023 series reads like another chapter: technical perfection, elegance, structure, rule, research. Here, textile becomes a system. A precise object. And yet it remains soft.
This tension is key:
restraint and presence.
An aesthetic that claims nothing—yet holds everything.
And then there is the body.
You want to touch these works. Almost compulsively. You want to feel fibres between your fingers, because the eye alone is not enough. Wagner’s works activate a memory: that art is not only visual, but also tactile intelligence—physical attention.
Her paper works radicalize this idea. They are not painting on paper, where paper acts as support. Here, paper is the work itself: immediate, direct, without intermediary. Embossed into a soft bed, they exist in an in-between state—featherlight and weighty at once, delicate yet grounded.
Wagner’s practice is driven by ongoing research. She travels, studies, and collects knowledge of traditional dyeing, weaving, and papermaking techniques, translating them into contemporary sculptural language. Among these references is the Japanese Ikat technique—tradition not as nostalgia, but as a tool for the future.
‘a calming presence’ is therefore not an exhibition about calm, but about attention: about what happens when speed is removed and precision is introduced; when materials are taken seriously; when the everyday—cloth, fibre, paper—is given a renewed dignity.
And perhaps this is the question the exhibition asks: How can art produce calm today—without ever becoming passive?
