New York Toronto, 2025
200 x 46 x 56 cm

Beijing Hanoi Paris, 2025
78 x 44 x 65 cm

Stainless steel, plywood, PU leather, steel gears, motor, step motor, music box mechanic

Courtesy the artist

Thuy Tien Nguyen (b. 1993, Hanoi, Vietnam) is a graduate of the Städelschule and lives between Frankfurt am Main and Hanoi. Her artistic practice often begins with the properties of everyday objects. She questions their narrative associations and their communicative power within societal codes.

For And This is Us 2025, Nguyen commissioned the production of three pieces of furniture in Vietnam and had them imported to Germany: a filing cabinet, a boardroom table, and an office chair. These are elements typically found in any standard office environment. She has had them manufactured with high-gloss polished surfaces in reflective dark tones, accented by gleaming steel rods. The refined design language evokes a sense of prestige, yet also standardisation—reminiscent of executive offices in major law firms or corporate headquarters. Nguyen has scaled down the dimensions of the three objects. They have been stripped of their original function to become resonating bodies for a system of gears that plays a melody.

Across cultures and historical periods, the staging of power through the arrangement and design of interior spaces has always been cultivated. The size of a president’s desk, the distance it creates between them and their counterpart, the subtly elevated height of a seat that reinforces hierarchical order, or a room divider separating public from private space—like an ornate folding screen—all serve as spatial tools of power. In Frankfurt’s financial district, where banks and international law firms are based, the spaces where power is exercised and managed are always carefully choreographed.

Nguyen has installed delicate systems of gears into three everyday objects from financial capitalism, which produce a melody via music boxes: “It’s just a burning memory.” The song refers to a music project that centres on the theme of forgetting. It is a slowed-down version of a 1930s original, allowing the past to leave an echo in the present. The mechanism itself was reverse-engineered based on existing models and then recreated by a Vietnamese engineer. To activate the system at the Frankfurter Kunstverein, Nguyen uses a voltage converter. This transformation of electrical voltage—from the Vietnamese to German system—serves as a conceptual device within her work. It highlights standardised systems that, when mismatched, produce a distortion: the melody played is altered. The attempt to translate a global aesthetic of office furniture fails slightly; the distorted sound disrupts the illusion of perfection. In many of her works, Nguyen juxtaposes materials with opposing qualities: hard and soft, organic and metallic, solid and fluid.

The three pristine and elegant objects present themselves in their flawless execution. Their refined formal language conveys a sense of universality. They seem to stand as metaphors for global societal and economic systems. Yet they are also the product of outsourced labour within a globalised market economy—one that continues to follow colonial fault lines.

Nguyen reflects on how subtle differences in the design and treatment of materials can convey hierarchical positions. This visual language also carries with it a model of corporate organisation and behaviour that has been adopted worldwide.

Thuy Tien Nguyen (b. 1993, Hanoi, VN) lives and works in Hanoi (VN) and Frankfurt am Main (DE). In 2024, she completed her studies at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste – Städelschule as a Meisterschülerin in the class of Prof. Haegue Yang. Previously, she graduated with a BA from the Hanoi Academy of Theater and Cinema (VN) in 2015. In her artistic practice, she explores materiality and perception by staging contrasts such as hardness and softness, or dryness and moisture. Her works often create atmospheric scenes that bear traces of past actions and challenge the viewers’ senses.

Her works have been shown in numerous international institutions, festivals, and off-spaces, including Stiftung BINZ39, Zurich (CH), Hanoi Creative Festival Weekend 2024, Hanoi (VN), RAY Triennale at the Museum Angewandte Kunst, Frankfurt am Main (DE), Nova Contemporary, Bangkok (TH), Delfina Foundation, London (GB), Documenta 15 at the Stadtmuseum Kassel (DE), and Nassauischer Kunstverein, Wiesbaden (DE). She has been nominated for several prestigious awards and has won numerous prizes, including the Young Generation Art Award by Monopol Magazine x Degussa (2025), the Städelschule – Portikus e.V. Graduate Prize (2024), the McKinsey Award (2023), the Deutschlandstipendium (2021), the DAAD Prize (2020), and the Ernst & Young Rundgang Prize (2020). Her residencies include the V.A.C. Residency Program in Hanoi, VN (2025), Salonul de proiecte in Bucharest, RO (2024), Koganecho Bazzar in Yokohama, JP (2018), and Mutual Unknow by CuratorsLab in Jakarta, ID (2017).

Ohne Titel (swarm), 2025
Watercolour on hardboard, wood, acrylic
200 x 120 cm

Ohne Titel (man and bird), 2025
Pencil on paper, glass, wood
22,5 x 15,5 cm

Courtesy the artist

Oscar Kargruber (b. 1999, Sulzrain, Germany) is currently studying sculpture at the Städelschule in Frankfurt. His practice spans drawing, painting, and sculpture. His visual worlds seek to capture a specific atmosphere, one that makes moments of the uncanny and the ambiguous perceptible through essential forms.

For And This is Us 2025, he has created a wooden sculpture staged with elements of abstract painting and drawing. The sculpture depicts a human figure, upright and striding forwards, emerging from a thicket, grasping plants in its hands. Its gaze seeks ours. The expression is ambiguous, enigmatic, the mouth slightly open. The sculpture seems to capture a frozen moment in time—a gesture halted in motion and held in wood. Yet in its unresolved tension, it resists definitive interpretation.

Kargruber describes his subjects as intuitive moments that emerge through drawing and from personal memories. In their symbolism and formal qualities, they reference works from art history, literature, and film. In his sculptures, he searches for a primal quality in form—for the strange, the manic, the authentic, and the passionate.

Karl Blossfeldt’s early modernist close-up photographs of plants serve as a visual source for Kargruber’s carved thicket. He is fascinated by the diversity and formal rigour of Blossfeldt’s magnifications, which produce a totemic and almost threatening kind of beauty. Kargruber translates these into aesthetic elements within his sculpture.

In his practice, Kargruber approaches, almost methodically, the depiction of atmospheric tipping points—moments when beauty threatens to turn into something uncanny, where the lines between good and evil, beauty and danger begin to blur. He seeks this sense of ambiguity. Is the figure under threat, reaching for the plants for support? Or is it itself a threat, hiding in the undergrowth, clutching the foliage with force?

His training as a master wood sculptor enables him to apply his virtuosic skill in carving delicate, intricate forms from solid blocks of wood. The wooden figure is spatially expanded by two wall pieces: an abstract painting made up of dotted colour points describing a spiral movement, and a small pencil drawing showing a figure in profile holding a seed between their lips, which a bird grasps with its beak. Kargruber sees these images as energy made material—gestural traces that make the field of force surrounding his figures perceptible.

Oscar Kargruber draws inspiration from sculptural traditions of both antiquity and modernity. The power of frontal representation found in Greek  and Egyptian sculpture, as well as in Etruscan art, resonates within his visual language. He is drawn to reduced forms that allow only the essential to remain. In his work, Kargruber is not interested in naturalistic depiction. His treatment of volume and anatomy is stylised rather than idealised. The silhouette of the body, in its linearity, is universal. It rejects gendered attributes and individual characteristics—yet the gaze remains central and is rendered with great expressiveness. With his timeless and raw aesthetic, Kargruber stands as a representative of a contemporary approach that consciously distances itself from dominant modes of current artistic expression.

Oscar Kargruber (b. 1999, Sulzrain, DE) has been studying sculpture at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste – Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main (DE) under Prof. Tobias Rehberger since 2022. Prior to that, he studied at the State Academy of Fine Arts Karlsruhe (DE) from 2021 to 2022. Between 2016 and 2021, Kargruber completed an apprenticeship as a master wood sculptor at the Städtische Berufs- und Meisterschule für das Holzbildhauerhandwerk in Munich (DE). In his work, he focuses primarily on traditional artistic techniques such as sculpture, painting and drawing. While his motifs are usually created in intuitive moments, their symbolism and formality consciously build up references to art history, literature and film.

Kargruber has presented his work at the following institutions: Piktogram, Warsaw (PL), Galleria Fuocherello, Turin (IT), Halfsister, Berlin (DE), Delphispace, Freiburg (DE), Kornhäuschen, Aschaffenburg (DE), Art Basel in Paris (FR). Since 2024, he has been a scholarship holder of the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes.

Video, colour, stereo, 4K

12 min

The prophet: Morten Rose

With Khashayar Zandyavari, Sara Elizabeth Egede Andersson, Thorbjørn Pihl, Loqman Ahmed, Oliver Engelmand, Sidsel Buch

Camera: John Hussain Flindt

Sound: Khashayar Zandyavari

Assistence: Line Lyhne

Colour correction: Botond Nagy

Sound mix: Leon Goltermann

Courtesy the artist

Paul Haas (b. 1992, Eilenburg, Germany) graduated from the Städelschule. His practice centres primarily on film, but also includes photography and installation. At the thematic core of his work lies a critical examination of origin and the construction of political identity. A particular focus in his recent projects has been on life in rural regions of Germany, drawing on autobiographical experiences from his youth in Northern Saxony.

Haas’s films engage with the ideologically charged visual language of recent German history. They trace its fractures and dangerous lines of continuity, revealing possible links between past and present. His references include films from the GDR, as well as a critical engagement with folkloric and nationalist nature symbols—such as the eagle or the stag—and with militarised ideals of masculinity. What interests Haas is the extent to which these images and ideals persist into the present day.

For And This is Us 2025, Haas has created a film developed during his current residency in Copenhagen. The film opens with a close-up that transitions into a long tracking shot, gradually revealing the setting. On a sunny day, a man stands in a public square with a portable speaker and microphone. The figure begins to deliver a speech, declaiming to the open air, indifferent to the people strolling across Kongens Nytorv—a central, bustling square in the Danish capital. The tone and diction of his speech evoke the presence of a prophet. He warns that he comes from the future, that it is bleak, conjuring images of war, destruction, and death—a war believed to be over, yet destined to return.

Interwoven throughout the film are brief vignettes of interpersonal conversations. But the prophet’s speech remains the central thread. Though his appearance is unremarkable, he stands apart from the passers-by, who continue unbothered, unaware. Played by Danish actor Morten Rose, the prophet remains an ambivalent figure. His speech teeters between anti-war rhetoric and a call to arms—as if it were a message foretelling the fateful repetition of history.

Haas films the protagonist from a great distance using a telephoto lens, observing him in the vast openness of the square—unnoticed, unheard. This stylistic choice, borrowed from wildlife documentary filmmaking, allows Haas to describe action from afar, reinforcing the sense of quiet estrangement.

In Haas’s work—this piece being no exception—there is often a diffuse atmosphere of constant tension. He achieves this ambivalence through the blending of documentary and fictional elements. Professional actors are deliberately cast alongside non-actors, with performances shifting between improvisation and scripted delivery.

Paul Haas (b. 1992, Eilenburg, DE) studied Fine Arts in the class of Prof. Gerard Byrne at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main (DE), graduating in 2024 as a master student. Previously, he studied Media Art at the Bauhaus University Weimar (DE). In his film and video works, Haas uses both documentary and fictional techniques.

His works have been shown in group exhibitions at the Museum of Odesa Modern Art, Odesa (UA), ACUD, Berlin (DE), and the Goethe-Institut Dublin (IE). He has had solo exhibitions at the Nassauischer Kunstverein Wiesbaden (DE) in 2020, the Ausstellungshalle 1A, Frankfurt am Main (DE) in 2023, and the 1822-Forum of the Frankfurter Sparkasse, Frankfurt am Main (DE) in 2024. In 2023, he won the Städelschule Rundgang Film Award, and in 2025, he will be an Artist in Residence at Art Hub Copenhagen (DK). Since 2025, he has been part of the HAP studio program at basis e.V. in Frankfurt am Main (DE).