For the start of the fall season, Galerie Nicolas Krupp in Basel (Switzerland) presents an exhibition of works by Kaspar Müller. Kaspar Müller, born in 1983 in Schaffhausen, lives and works in Basel. The exhibition, titled “Maintenance 3” runs from 28 August to 31 October 2026.
Maintenance 3 presents Kaspar Müller’s works, leftover studio pieces, found objects, private photos, and old drawings as if they were sitting in a storage room. The show looks overflowing and fragile at the same time. It asks how artworks and everyday things lose meaning, fall apart, and get reused.Works on the walls show Müller recycling earlier pieces: sculptures become drawings, photos are reassembled, colorful paintings are painted over in white. Objects in the space come from past exhibitions. A traffic cone is cut and cast in glass. Children’s workshop materials, new hardware-store buckets, and balloons are also on view.Each object seems to hold a quiet story of earlier use and contact. The works feel present precisely because they do not explain themselves. The exhibition is the third with this title and, in its arrangement, follows the previous exhibitions at Galerie Vavassori in Milan (Maintenance 2, 2022, and Maintenance, 2017).
Kaspar Müller (born 1983 in Schaffhausen) is a Swiss artist working in painting, sculpture, glass, photography, video, and installation. He studied in Basel, co-founded artist-run spaces there, later worked in Berlin and Zurich, and has taught at ECAL Lausanne. His practice treats everyday objects and images—lamps, straw figures, decorative patterns, tourist footage—as slightly opaque motifs that reappear across media. Recurring themes include circulation, craft versus mass production, and how meaning shifts through reproduction. He has exhibited at Kunsthalle Zürich, Kunsthalle Bern, Vleeshal, Art Basel Parcours, and galleries in Berlin, Zurich, Milan, and Paris, and received the Manor Prize and a Kadist production award.
Exhibition text (translated from German):
Maintenance 3 displays the precarious ontological status of artworks (and everyday objects). The artist’s own works, fragments from production, ready-mades, private photographs, and drawings dating back to Müller’s youth are arranged as if in a studio or storage space. It is a baroque project, overflowing and perishable: cool, self-referential deconstruction and an elegy to entropy. The transience of every symbolic system and every communicative, lived context hovers over the exhibition. It celebrates “the dark feast of life” (Gerhard Meier).
The works on the walls offer insight into Müller’s interest in the continual reorganization and remediation of individual groups of works. Sculptures appear as drawings; film stills and photographs are assembled into new units of meaning; visually opulent “Mandala” paintings are whitewashed with dispersion. There are (auto-)aggressive elements. The works in the space operate in a similar way: they too come from various past exhibition contexts and are fragments of existing bodies of work. A traffic cone from an exhibition has been halved and cast in glass. Material from a workshop with children lies around. Shiny new OBI buckets and balloons reflect our gaze.
The exhibition could thus also be told as a series of “anecdotes on a topography of chance” (Daniel Spoerri). Every piece in the exhibition carries a story that could disclose itself to attentive viewers as in a tableau-piège. They point to past social interactions and symbolic transactions. In Kaspar Müller’s exhibition, the objects are uncannily present in their muteness, in their refusal to speak. In the preface to the Topographie anecdotée du hasard, which he translated into German in 1968, Dieter Roth comments on the human relationship to objects of every kind as follows—and, it seems to me, conclusively:
“So we worry a great deal, sometimes about the stuff (the things in front of our noses), sometimes about the things (the stuff in memory). Sometimes about people with all their stuff, sometimes about all the things people have produced, sometimes about the people rummaging through stuff, sometimes about human stuff, sometimes about the people who slosh about in the stuff that has been produced, sometimes about the dealers who mix people with the things. And we worry about the people (the dealers), and about the dealers (the people), and about ourselves (people as dealers) and again about ourselves (dealers as people). And the stuff (all the things) sits on us: sometimes in front of our noses (on our skin), sometimes in memory (inside the head), sometimes in the pile (under our behinds), sometimes in the heart (on the stomach), sometimes on the wall (in the frame), sometimes in the book (on the paper), and one begins to ask, sometimes: ‘Is my hand a piece of stuff, the way it keeps holding such a pile of things—and itself along with them—in front of my nose?’ and sometimes: ‘Is my heart a thing, the way it wobbles and trembles in the squeeze with the stuff I load onto it—or to which I keep hanging it?’ One asks, and one asks, and one asks, for example, whether everything one touches becomes stuff, even if only with the tongue? And whether one’s tongue is a dealer’s hand? (Whatever it touches becomes a weight, at least as heavy as printer’s ink. It turns to stone, even if it was once flesh and blood.)”
Arthur Fink, 27 August 2026
