Philipp Gufler: Imitations of Paul

 

1.5 - 4.7.2026

Opening: May 1, 7 p.m. 

Very few biographies leave behind a coherent, self-contained archive. Most persist primarily as traces—in images, in relationships, in what is repeated, cited, or strategically withheld. Philipp Gufler’s work begins precisely in these lacunae, integrating fragments of histor(ies) into his artistic practice. For the exhibition Imitations of Paul, he enters into dialogue with Paul Hoecker (1854–1910), a painter whose life and work were long marginalized and whose extensive oeuvre has yet to be fully catalogued. Hoecker’s career came to an abrupt end in 1898, when his homosexuality was on the verge of becoming public.

“Imitations of Paul” finds Gufler taking Hoecker’s complex biography as the point of departure for an act of artistic identification. The textile and ceramic works on view explore how new forms, images, and narratives can emerge from fragmentary archival traces. And yet imitation here is not conceived as mere replication: drawing on drag as an art form, it operates as a practice of appropriation, exaggeration, and transformation—a productive process that establishes proximity, acknowledges difference, and, through repetition, brings forth something distinctly its own.

In contrast to narratives that claim closure, Gufler’s works conceive of history as an open structure that can be extended and displaced through artistic reference. In the deliberate reprise of motifs, attitudes, and gestures, what emerges is a new proposition.

While the textile work Imitations of Paul—with its semi-transparent silkscreen prints on fabric—lends all of Hoecker’s works known to date an almost spectral presence in the gallery space, Gufler takes a new direction with the ceramic series Sexual Aesthetics. Here, images from and about Hoecker’s life intersect with art-historical and socio-historical visual references drawn from the extensive image archives associated with the sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld. The quoted motifs revolve around desire and sexuality, ranging from prehistoric cave representations to medieval and early modern art, and extending to photographs from the early twentieth century. Gufler combines Hoecker’s painting “Ave Maria”, among other works, with a woodcut depicting the torture of figures whose in some cases rapt expressions evoke less a state of suffering than an affinity with Marquis de Sade. Works like these move beyond a narrowly biographical reading to operate associatively.

A pronounced corporeality is shared by both the textile and ceramic works. The fabric installation presents Hoecker’s oeuvre as it is currently known, lending the motifs an undeniable presence despite the material’s lightness. The white fabric gathers all works identified to date through research, while the black shows those now considered lost or destroyed, as well as works whose present owners the Paul Hoecker Research Group has not yet been able to trace. For each painting, Gufler produced silkscreens at original scale through physically demanding processes. In the ceramic works, he likewise employs silkscreen printing, layering the motifs between successive firings, after which they are partially obscured by a high-gloss glaze. This deliberate interplay of concealing and revealing takes on another spatial dimension through the use of stamps, transforming the pieces into reliefs. In their emphatic materiality, the ceramic works form a tense counterpoint to the seemingly immaterial textile installation.

As a founding member of the Paul Hoecker Research Group, Gufler is directly involved in the collective research into Hoecker’s life and work. This collaborative production of knowledge forms a central backdrop to the exhibition and is exemplified in the final gallery space through a presentation of relevant archival materials. The insights developed jointly within the group are ultimately translated by Gufler into his own distinct artistic perspective. The exhibition thus unfolds within a field of tension between collective knowledge production, individual authorship, and a critical reflection on a long-marginalized artistic biography.

The exhibition is accompanied by the publication “Spuren von Paul / Traces of Paul” (Splitter 19, Forum Queeres Archiv München in collaboration with BQ, Berlin), which brings together exhibition and research as a performative collective endeavor. In the polyphony of texts and images, Paul Hoecker emerges as part of an open process of ongoing historical and artistic re-examination.

Text: Nicholas Maniu and Christina Spachtholz

BQ
Jörn Bötnagel and Yvonne Quirmbach
Weydingerstrasse 10
10178 Berlin
Tel. +49-30-23457316
info@bqberlin.de
Tue–Sat 11–18 h

Buchpräsentation Spuren von Paul | Traces of Paul

Saturday, 02.05.2026, 3 pm 

Book launch “Splitter 19: Spuren von Paul | Traces of Paul”, published by Forum Queeres Archiv München e.V. and BQ, Berlin

Philipp Gufler in conversation with Stefan Gruhne, Nicholas Maniu and Christina Spachtholz (Paul Hoecker Research Group)

Stefan Gruhne, Philipp Gufler, Nicholas Maniu, Christina Spachtholz (Ed.), “Splitter 19: Spuren von Paul | Traces of Paul”, Forum Queeres Archiv München e.V. and BQ, Berlin, with texts by Karin Althaus, Gerhard Becker, Vera Christoph, Stefan Gruhne, Philipp Gufler, Birgit Jooss, Yuliia Kizyma, Nicholas Maniu, Christina Spachtholz, Arnisa Zeqo (German/English), 112 pages, 14 b&w illustrations, 61 coloured illustrations

BQ

Weydingerstrasse 10

10178 Berlin

SEXUAL AESTHETICS at Martin von Zomeren

 

Philipp Gufler: SEXUAL AESTHETICS

March 7 - April 18, 2026

Opening: Saturday, March 7, 2026, 5 - 7 p.m.

Saturday, April 18, 4 pm

Finissage with a conversation by Viktor Neumann and Philipp Gufler

In SEXUAL AESTHETICS, three bodies of work come together: quilts, mirror paintings, and the ceramic series Sexual Aesthetics, from which the exhibition takes its title. In Gufler’s work, research and material production exist in constant exchange. The way a work is made shapes how its story unfolds, while the historical narratives he engages with thread through his choice of material. Histories become tangible, something that can be cut, stitched, looked at, mirrored, shaped, and fired. His extensive experience with archives is reflected in the meticulous way he produces his work. Archives consist of partial records, inconsistencies, and silences, and the patience required to navigate them becomes visible in his artistic process – one shaped by the endurance of slow, sustained making, and an embrace of transparency and distortion. Like textiles or clay, history is assembled over time through acts of selection and emphasis. Rather than presenting history as fixed or complete, Gufler approaches it as something continuously formed and re-formed.

Mirror paintings

The mirror works, which Gufler describes as “performative paintings,” begin with pigment. Each colour is mixed with pigments by hand. Painted one by one, colour by colour, through silkscreen onto mirrored glass. The process unfolds slowly: screen positioned, squeegee pressed, as weight is shifted across the surface, the density of colour changes with bodily pressure – even a small change in angle can create visible textures in the pigment. When two colours overlap, a third tone forms at the intersection. Seen in the center panel, as the layers build, the amount of reflection lessens and the viewer’s own image of themselves becomes partially withheld. 

Gufler situates these works in dialogue with the history of Minimalism while “queering” its austerity by reintroducing the bodily presence and self-reflection. Some works adopt a triangular form, recalling the pink triangle once used to stigmatise queer people and later reclaimed as a symbol of resistance and collective memory. The mirrored boxes are a variation on his original works, containing the reflection ever so slightly more securely with enclosed structures.

Quilts

Gufler’s work does not approach history as a purely aesthetic reference. In the quilts, his engagement with the past takes on a more explicit form. Gufler approaches quilting as a ritual structure rooted in mourning and remembrance, each quilt is dedicated to a specific figure and grows out of sustained archival research, sometimes involving weeks spent studying personal estates and image collections. He carefully selects fabrics whose textures and colours resonate with particular aspects of their lives, often highlighting overlooked or marginalised elements of their stories.

“I always try to focus on people, either who are not in the focus or... I’m able to find a new angle.”

The compositions are deliberate and carefully constructed: photographs are mirrored, cropped, or subtly altered, and texts are embedded directly into the fabric.

Working with silkscreen, a medium he has developed over nearly two decades, he builds layered textile constellations in which personal desire, political struggle, and art history intersect. For example, in the quilt dedicated to Charlotte Wolff (1897– 1986), one of the early sexual scientists active in Berlin during the Weimar Republic, Gufler reworks a historical photograph by Man Ray by mirroring it and removing the second hand, so that she appears to read with her own hand rather than someone else’s. In close contact with the surrealist artists, Wolff later turned to palm reading after her medical licence was no longer recognised in exile, continuing her research on hands in a different form.

Ceramic works

While the quilts follow a structured internal logic, the ceramic works required a different attitude and tempo. They were developed during a three-month residency at EKWC (European Ceramic Work Centre), where Gufler extended his long-standing silkscreen practice into clay. Unlike conventional ceramic silkscreen methods, where images are printed onto already finished tiles and fired at lower temperatures, he printed with coloured clay directly onto wet, still-formable surfaces. After screen printing, he further processed the surface with stamps. His first bisque firings reached around 1200°C, after which he printed again with glaze followed by further firings at approximately 1040°C. Because many of the oxides and pigments may chemically react in extreme heat, the final result could never be fully predicted; prints sometimes shifted dramatically or reappeared as faint shadows. 

The moment of opening the kiln was the first time he would see the work, often confronting something entirely different from what he has imagined. He describes how this unpredictability initially frustrated him, before he learned to accept and embrace the loss of control. 

The ceramic works can be understood as traces of an unfolding process, tiles carrying the memory of their making, holding within their surfaces the artist’s method. Over time, he developed a rhythm within this delayed process, producing more than thirty tiles during the working period in what he described as an intense, almost obsessive cycle. The imagery embedded in the ceramics stems from extensive prior archival research; many of these images relate to the archive of Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin, an institute that was destroyed in 1933, and whose image archive was partially displaced, sold, lost, and later spread in fragments across Europe. Some materials resurfaced only as reproductions in books, with limited documentation of their origins. Long-term references of Gufler such as Cosy Pièro and Karl Heinrich Ulrichs resurface and merge with images from the sexological picture atlases of Hirschfeld from prehistory, the Middle Ages, and up to their present day. The title refers to Sexual Aesthetics by Peter Gorsen, a book that examined how ideas about sexuality have shaped artistic production, and how those ideas are themselves influenced by the social and cultural values of their time.

Text: Mabel Woodley

Martin van Zomeren

Hazenstraat 20

1016 SP Amsterdam
contact@gmvz.com

Gallery opening hours
Wednesday - Saturday: 13:00–18:00