Gerold Miller
20 Mar. – 02 May 2026
Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed – the title alludes to an English idiom that traditionally symbolises good luck, memory and a new beginning. This is precisely what this exhibition is about. Both artists work with existing materials. They appropriate, alter, reduce and shift meanings. Nothing comes from nothing. The old is not replaced, but transformed. What remains are traces of its history – and, at the same time, something radically new.
For the first time, the works of Pip Culbert (1938–2016) and Gerhard Hoehme (1920–1989) come together in a joint exhibition. At first glance, their works appear to have little in common. Culbert works with shirts, bags, tents or fabrics, whilst Hoehme works with paint, string and plastic tubing, alongside the corresponding drawings. Yet both are united by a similar artistic approach: they remove materials from their original context and grant them a new existence. The focus is not on the object itself, but on its structure, its tension and its relationship to space.
Pip Culbert consistently removes everything superfluous. What remains of garments are seams, lines and fragile frameworks. What was once functional becomes an open drawing in space. She herself describes this process as deconstruction and reconstruction: “I began cutting away the fabric from found garments, tarpaulins and so on, to leave the seams in place. […] The destruction of the fabric object gives rise to the need for a system, although chaos in itself tends towards structure.” Her works straddle the boundaries between sculpture, drawing and architecture. They invert the inside and the outside, reveal what is hidden and challenge our notions of what constitutes the ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ side of an object.
Gerhard Hoehme, too, never viewed the picture as a self-contained surface. From the late 1950s onwards, he increasingly liberated painting from its frame and developed works that extend into the space. Strings, tubes and other materials become lines that connect the picture with its surroundings. Hoehme understood his works as open fields of energy, whose meaning only emerges in the relationship between the work, the space and the viewer.
His drawings play a special role in this context. They are not preparatory sketches, but independent works in which his artistic thinking is directly evident. With just a few lines, Hoehme develops complex spatial relationships and tensions. Here, the drawing does not merely describe a space – it creates it.
It is precisely in this that the affinity with Pip Culbert lies. Both artists consistently transcend the boundaries between painting, sculpture and object. Culbert transforms a seam into a drawing in space. Hoehme transforms a drawing into a space. Both reduce rather than add. What emerges in her work from seams and fabric edges, Hoehme develops using pencil, ink, paint or string. Both work with lines that do not delimit but connect. Both create open systems that extend beyond the artwork into the space and into the viewer’s perception.
The exhibition is therefore not intended as a juxtaposition of two positions, but as the discovery of an unexpected kinship. Although Pip Culbert and Gerhard Hoehme belong to different generations and cultural contexts and never met, they are united by an artistic mindset that remains remarkably relevant to this day.
The exhibition is realised with the kind support of a major private collection, Meerbusch, and FoxJensenMcCrory, the estate of Pip Culbert, New Zealand.
The following works are from the Press Paintings series, which explores the retouching of American press photographs from the 1950s. The works raise questions about the visibility, selection, and exclusion of images—and about the mechanisms of image editing, which continue to function in similar ways today. For news coverage at the time, photographs were heavily edited and manipulated. By enlarging the blackand- white print templates, Riemer brings precisely these interventions into focus and asks: What is deemed worthy of being shown—and what disappears from the image?
On view in the Separée is a new work that explores the dissolution and erasure of images. For this piece, Riemer chemically treated original prints by F. C. Gundlach and then rephotographed them. In the finished images, only outlines and shadows remain visible—in a sense, the essence of the original photograph. The devaluation, revaluation, and transformation of photography are directly intertwined here.
In contrast, Katja Tönnissen’s works, displayed throughout the gallery, engage us with a humorous, direct, and at the same time very physical visual language. In her work, playful lightness is combined with seriousness and a keen curiosity about materials and possibilities.
For example, lampshades become canvases on which the interplay of colors simulates natural shifts in light and mood. Other works address questions of humanity, cultural history, and societal images. Ceramic objects initially elude clear interpretation and only reveal themselves at second glance as body parts or genitalia. In this way, Tönnissen responds to normative discourses on beauty and reclaims the authority to interpret the female body.
She reduces symbols of femininity, longing, and physicality to clear, almost iconic forms. Her works navigate the space between abstraction and bodily memory, posing questions about space and material: When does an object become a body, and when does a body become a form? The result is deliberately exaggerated, pop-art-inspired images that oscillate between irony and seriousness.
Despite this immediacy, her works are based on elaborate traditional techniques such as ceramics and bronze. The result is precisely crafted sculptures with a strong presence that remain both open and ambiguous. Katja Tönnissen develops an independent, consistent, and physically tangible artistic stance from the material itself.
Navigating the terrain between personal connection, a photographic search for traces, and sculptural directness, Here, There, Once And For All opens a dialogue about memory, visibility, the body, and projection—and about the question of how images arise, change, and continue to resonate within us.
Miller continually explores the conditions of each individual artwork—the conditions of its creation as well as the conditions of its contextualization in the exhibition space, in publications, in the artist’s own texts, and on the internet. For Miller, each of these formats—including his own website and an Instagram account—is not merely an image or a narrative thread, but a test, a game, a round. Time and again, combinations and sequences are compared, shifted, tested, and new constellations created. Much like in a card game, the elements are limited; it is precisely this concentration and regulation that give rise to extensive possibilities for development and differentiation. It is these shifting and repetitive movements, steps, and processes within the various groups of works that ultimately lead to perfection while achieving maximum effectiveness—this is Gerold Miller’s method: continuous training. To describe Miller’s style as a minimalist formal language is misleading. He develops his work from a radical, conceptual, and elegant foundation, allowing himself moments of intuition. If one traces the evolution of the resulting works, one can see, within the framework of self-imposed principles, their great diversity and remarkable openness.
Based on a text by Frank Boehm
Installation views photo J. Bendzulla
GEROLD MILLER | GALLERY EXHIBITIONS
