Play The Red Line: Klaudia Schifferle

Play The Red Line navigates the tensions between immediacy and transformation, form and disintegration. Her works in the exhibition combine vividly sprayed canvases, plaster sculptures, and a new series titled Magic Girls, with each medium feeding into the next through. 

Schifferle's use of acrylic spray paint asserts a direct, physical presence. In works like O.T. (2024) and Sliding Lines (2025), bold color fields, fractured figures, and skeletal lines vibrate. Magic Girls (2024), a six-part series of sprayed canvases, expose the body and the self as mutable and constantly renegotiated. Rendered with energy, these figures are not portraits but suggest a state of motion—joyous, fierce, and resistant. They inhabit terrains where vulnerability does not collapse but instead becomes an active, almost magical, form of agency.  Lift Off Boots (2024), a four-part work of sprayed canvases, stages the boot as an icon and a ghost. Repeated but never identical, the boots suggest movement and steps taken or deferred while the bodies remain absent but are implied. In repetition they shift from object to gesture, from fetish to echo. 

Throughout the exhibition, Schifferle weaves wit with confrontation, and emotional intensity. Works like Girl Goes Outside, But The World Is Not OK (2025) and Looming Monster (2024) capture the uneasy negotiation of often hostile environments, particularly through a female experience. Femininity, in Schifferle’s practice, is not represented as stable or idealized or a unified concept; instead, it mutates and confronts through fragmented bodies, and hybrid forms that challenge conventional depictions of woman with joy, mischievousness, defiance, and emotional intensity. 

Schifferle’s paintings and sculptures draw from references such as gender and politics, filtered through a distinctly subjective lens. These heavy undercurrents emerge through crowded, synthesized textures, yet the works resist becoming didactic or severe. Instead, they remain flexible, even lighthearted, animated by a poeticism and a sincerity. There is a joyfulness at work and a stubborn, clear energy that allows Schifferle’s figures, gestures, and improvised structures to remain open, inviting, and alive.

Standstill/Stillstand (2024)—a bass drum pedal immobilized in plaster—and Out of Balance (2024), a shelving unit tilting precariously under its own weight, evoke bodies caught between action and inertia. Living on a Cat Tree (2024/2025) reconfigures a domestic object into a fragile totem of precarious survival, while Swollen Gun (2024) transforms a weapon to both soft and light. Office Chair (2025)—a contorted desk chair wrapped in plaster and graphite—captures the absurdity embedded in structures of labor and discipline, subtly echoing a critique of gendered expectations around the body and work, and revealing a tension between function and failure. Play The Red Line (2024) is an assemblage of bass guitar, stand, cable, and plaster bandages that translates musical improvisation into frozen form: an instrument silenced, but still vibrating with latent energy. 

Music is a foundational element in Schifferle’s practice. It informs not just the mood but also the formal structure of her works and exhibitions. She uses rhythm, repetition, and disruption as compositional strategies. Music also introduces a tension between control and chaos, which parallels her exploration of femininity as shifting and unruly. Rather than serving as a background element, music actively shapes the emotional and physical dynamics of her work.

Schifferle conjures abstracted landscapes that unfold as poetic terrains. In paintings such as Take a Ticket Through the Thicket (2023) and Camouflaged Sky (2025), she explores two distinct yet interconnected visions of nature. In Take a Ticket Through the Thicket, a four-part series rendered with acrylic spray on canvas, fine linear structures intertwine into a dense, almost impenetrable mesh, evoking the chaotic intricacies of undergrowth. Similarly, Camouflaged Sky (2025) presents a stylized abstraction of the sky through layered, translucent blue forms.The crowded, flattened surface captures the collapse of sun, sky, and nature into an immersive field.

In Inkognito (2024), a sculpture of an animal figure wearing a fedora and wrapped in plaster bandages, animality is neither naturalized nor innocent. Instead, it becomes a surrogate, a double of human behavior. The work hints at other ways of being, challenging fixed identities and suggesting porous boundaries between species, genders, and states of consciousness.

Play The Red Line unfolds in two distinct but interconnected environments. In the first room, visitors enter a restless interior landscape where thoughts, memories, and instincts leave their traces. Repetition, fragmentation, and layering create a space that feels internal and reflective of an atmosphere shaped by fleeting impressions and subconscious rhythms. In contrast, the second room opens like a stage set or a party in motion. Figures perform, sculptures become props, and gestures are amplified into something theatrical and bright. The mood shifts outward: playful, impulsive, and charged with the energy of performance, setting the scene for a world where inner tensions explode into movement, sound, and spectacle.

The ‘red line’ invoked in the title is not a fixed path but a volatile threshold—something to follow, cross, or push against. Within the exhibition, Klaudia Schifferle builds a world where bodies, landscapes, and emotions constantly shift and collide. Her works resist fixed meanings, embracing instability as a force of creativity and survival. Figures fragment, objects collapse, and animals slip into human forms. Deeply rooted in improvisational creation, Schifferle’s practice resists neat classification. Her restless, intuitive language speaks to resilience. What emerges is not a single narrative but a vivid, dynamic field of emotional and material intensity: a continuous rehearsal for survival, transformation, and the radical reimagining of bodies and worlds alike.