MATERIAL → FORM → OBJECT brings together works by Robert Coutelas, Meuser, Rosemarie Trockel and Machteld Rullens. Across generations and contexts, the exhibition examines how modest or industrial materials migrate from the realm of the functional into autonomous artistic objects. In different ways, each artist reimagines the status of material, testing the point at which it ceases to serve a prior purpose and instead asserts itself as medium, image, sculpture or form. Rather than presenting a linear history, the exhibition unfolds as a set of parallel approaches to transformation – procedures that are at once pragmatic and imaginative, grounded in the everyday yet capable of generating new artistic languages.
For Robert Coutelas (1930-1985), the material in question was cardboard: an abundant, discarded substance that he gathered from the streets of Paris. Unable to afford typical materials, he developed his own method of preparation, treating these small panels with layers of glue and polishing to create surfaces reminiscent of aged wooden icons. Within the tight format of these ‘cartes’, Coutelas drew from a deep reservoir of references: medieval France, tarot, popular theatre, mythology and arcane symbolism. The result is a body of work in which the humble material retains traces of the world from which it came, while simultaneously gaining the solemnity and intimacy of a devotional object. Here, material becomes image, and image becomes a site of memory – not only of Parisian nights and modest circumstances, but of a broader poetic afterlife for things overlooked.
Where Coutelas starts from cardboard, Meuser (b. 1964) begins with industrial metals: steel beams, architectural fragments and utilitarian offcuts. Stripped of function, these remnants are cut, folded, welded or compressed into sculptural forms that seem to navigate between the accidental and the precise. Although inherently heavy, Meuser’s works often behave with a surprising lightness and humour, revealing the sculptural and even painterly potentials hidden within industrial matter. Their monochromatic surfaces reflect this ambiguity, allowing the material to oscillate between object and image, between the architectural and the everyday. In Meuser’s work, material becomes form, and form gains a vocabulary that feels both post-war and deeply contemporary.
With Rosemarie Trockel (b. 1952), the transformation of material takes on a conceptual inflection. She is widely regarded as one of the most important and influential artists in Germany. Her sculptures, collages, ceramics, knitting pictures, drawings and photographs are noted for their subtle social critique and range of subversive, aesthetic strategies - including the reinterpretation of “feminine” techniques, the ironic shifting of cultural codes, a delight in paradox, and a refusal to conform to the commercial and institutional ideologies of the art system. The glazed surfaces of Trockel’s works possess a physical immediacy, yet they also register as propositions about medium and structure. Ceramic becomes a site of art-historical negotiation, touching on post-minimalism, Arte Povera and conceptual strategies, while retaining the intimacy of a domestic material. Trockel’s works operate as a hinge between the historical and the contemporary within the exhibition: material becomes object, but the object remains open to performance, idea and association.
In the work of Machteld Rullens (b. 1988), material and form converge in a contemporary vocabulary that traverses sculpture and painting. Using cardboard, resin, pigment and industrial fastenings, Rullens compresses, binds and coats her surfaces, producing works that are materially robust yet visually fluid. Planes buckle and volumes protrude; surfaces gleam or dull depending on pressure and accumulation. The works propose a hybrid language in which the sculptural object retains a pictorial logic, and the pictorial field gains a physical presence. Within the broader arc of the exhibition, Rullens’ works make legible the degree to which material can absorb gestures, forces and decisions, ultimately becoming an autonomous medium in its own right.
Taken together, the approaches of Coutelas, Meuser, Trockel and Rullens bring forth the continued relevance of modest materials as sites of artistic invention and reflection. Cardboard, steel and ceramic are not presented as metaphors for scarcity or poverty, nor as nostalgic relics, but as matter capable of reinvention and classical formats. MATERIAL → FORM → OBJECT proposes that materials carry afterlives – that they persist beyond their initial utility, gaining new identities through processes of making, thinking and reimagining. In this sense, the exhibition is not about materials themselves so much as the transformations they undergo, and the languages that emerge in their wake.
Presented by Siegfried Contemporary in Saanen, the exhibition invites viewers to consider how mediums are not fixed categories but mutable conditions shaped by context, history and use. Here, the everyday becomes a terrain for aesthetic possibility, and the object becomes a site in which material, form and idea converge.
Robert Coutelas (1930 – 1985) was a Parisian artist known for his distinctive, small-scale works and outsider approach to art. He lived much of his life in poverty and solitude, often working with found materials such as recycled cardboard to create thousands of miniature paintings resembling tarot cards, known as Mes Nuits. He also produced gouaches (Mes Ancêtres) and small stone or terracotta sculptures. Coutelas resisted commercial success, breaking gallery contracts to maintain artistic freedom. After his death in Paris in 1985, his work gained posthumous recognition.
Recent exhibitions include Jean Dubuffet / Robert Coutelas: The Joy of Innocence at Musée Réattu, Musée des Beaux-Arts d’Arles, Arles, France (2024); Listen to the Sound of the Earth Turning, Mori Art Museum (2022); Colours that Enfold the Night at Shoto Museum of Art, Tokyo, Japan (2015); I Seek the Small Golden Hand at Musée Bernard Buffet, Nagaizumi-cho, Shizuoka, Japan and Oyamazaki Villa Museum of Art, Oyamazaki, Kyoto, Japan (2016–17). His works are held in notable collections including the Fondation Jeanne Matossian, Fondation Antoine de Galbert, and the Musée des Arts Naïfs et Populaires de Noyers.
Machteld Rullens was born 1988 in The Hague, Netherlands, where she lives and works. She studied at the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam and the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague. In her work she transforms found cardboard boxes into sculptural wall works that blur the line between painting and sculpture. She shapes, paints and coats these materials with layers of oil, pigment and resin to create abstract compositions that explore form, color and material presence.
Recent solo exhibitions include Andrew Kreps/PAGE, New York (2025), Galeria Mascota, Mexico City (2025); Kunsthal Rotterdam, The Netherlands (2024); Sorry We’re Closed, Brussels (2024); PAGE (NYC), New York (2023); and Overduin & Co., Los Angeles (2023). Recent group exhibitions include Derosia, New York (2025); Lore Deutz, Cologne (2025); Galeria Mascota, Mexico City (2023); Martin van Zomeren, Amsterdam (2023); Overduin & Co., Los Angeles (2022); and Sorry We’re Closed, Brussels (2022). Rullens’ work is included in collections at AkzoNobel Art Foundation, Amsterdam; Celine Collection, Paris; CODA Museum, Apeldoorn; Collection de Bruin-Heijn, Wassenaar; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Rijkscollectie RCE, Amsterdam; Sammlung Ringier, Zurich; Stedelijk Museum Schiedam, Schiedam; and Stichting Kunstcollectie KPMG, Amsterdam. In 2019 she received the Royal Award for Modern Painting.
Meuser was born 1947 in Essen and lives and works in Karlsruhe. He studied at the Staatliche Kunstakademie Düsseldorf under Joseph Beuys and Erwin Heerich. His work is situated at the realm between sculpture and painting and is defined by sculptures and material assemblages made from found industrial metal elements. Meuser was a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts Karlsruhe from 1992 to 2015.
He had solo exhibitions at Museo De Arte Contemporaneo De Monterrey (2023), Skulpturenpark Heidelberg (2020), Städtische Galerie Karlsruhe (2011), Kunsthalle Düsseldorf (2008) and Kunsthalle Zürich (1991). His work was part of numerous group exhibitions such as Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna, Marta Herford (both 2018), Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen (2015), Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn (2013) and Deichtorhallen, Hamburg (2001). In 1992 Meuser participated at documenta IX. Collection include Centro Cultural Andratx, Sammlung Deutsche Bank, Frankel Collection for the Arts, Bloomfield Hills, Sammlung Falckenberg, Hamburg, The Martin Margulies Collection, Miami and Sammlung Viehof, Mönchengladbach.
Rosemarie Trockel was born 1952 in Schwerte, Germany and is based in Potsdam. She is widely regarded as one of the most important and influential artists in Germany. Her sculptures, collages, ceramics, knitting pictures, drawings and photographs are noted for their subtle social critique and range of subversive, aesthetic strategies—including the reinterpretation of “feminine” techniques, the ironic shifting of cultural codes, a delight in paradox, and a refusal to conform to the commercial and institutional ideologies of the art system.
Her first exhibitions took place at the galleries Monika Sprüth Cologne and Philomene Magers Bonn, both in 1983. Recent solo shows include MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt (2022), Moderna Museet Malmö (2018/19), Pinacoteca Giovanni e Marella Agnelli in Torino (2016), Kunsthaus Bregenz (2015), travelling exhibition at Museo National Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, at the New Museum, New York and Serpentine Gallery, London (2012/2013) and Wiels Brussels, Culturegest Lisboa, Lisbon and Museion Bozen, Bolzano (2012/2013). Her work was also included in exhibitions in major institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Fondation Beyeler in Riehen and the Deichtorhallen in Hamburg. Her important 2005 retrospective Post-Menopause took place at the Museum Ludwig Köln, Cologne and at MAXXI, Rome. In 1999 she became the first female artist to represent Germany at the Venice Biennial, and in 1997 she took part in the Documenta X at Kassel.