Philipp Gufler: SEXUAL AESTHETICS

March 7 - April 18, 2026

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

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