The group exhibition The Moon Is No Door brings together three artistic positions that engage in striking ways with space, perception, and meaning. Its point of departure is a quote from Sylvia Plath’s poem The Moon and the Yew Tree (1961), in which inner landscapes of thought intertwine with cosmic space. In the poem, color and light become means to render both mental and external dimensions of space tangible. The exhibition title plays with this poetic dissonance: The moon is no door—yet precisely through this literal impossibility, a conceptual space opens between inside and outside, between the material and the imaginary, between meaning and ambiguity. Subjectivity here appears not merely as a mode of spatial existence, but reveals that it is not the human who produces space, but space that shapes the human.

 

Mirror Spaces and Transcendental Spatial Experiences  

Luisa Baldhuber’s surreal, at times weightless visual worlds emerge from a tension between digital image-making, smartphone photography, and internet aesthetics. Fragmented, architecturally suggestive landscapes unfold that defy spatial localization and instead open up imaginary expanses. A central role is played by dichroic glass, whose polychromatic, reflective surface shifts color depending on the angle of light. Fictional image spaces and the real exhibition space overlap to form an object that changes with every movement of the viewer and eludes a fixed gaze. The glass surfaces function like permeable membranes—visual thresholds to a transcendent world. They open the view onto a second, poetically charged reality, in which the real and the imaginary intermingle, in which the gaze multiplies and dissolves in a floating presence. Despite their seemingly detached aesthetic, Baldhuber’s works remain connected to the real world. She titles her works with geographic coordinates—such as 44°29'02.1"N 161°08'19.6"W (2024)—referencing concrete places. This apparent localization contrasts with the visual indeterminacy of the images but lends the works a quiet anchoring in the global and draws attention to the tension between virtual construction and the physical world.

 

Anatomy of Spatial and Semantic Entanglements 

Johanna Strobel’s new, expansive sculptures emerge from her ongoing exploration of ceramic materials, architectural structures, and semantically charged forms. Suspended from the ceiling, the works consist of interwoven, unglazed ceramic bands reminiscent of anatomical structures—rib cages, torsos, pelvises. At the center of many of these constructions are glossy, dark spheres—at once moon, apple, heart, or womb. These hybrid forms oscillate between body and object, between symbol and substance. Strobel’s practice draws on concepts such as change, entropy, connectivity, and information. Her works interweave references from different eras, cultural contexts, and theoretical fields, engaging with the attribution and dissolution of meaning, the construction of subjectivity and objecthood, and their inscription into the everyday. The knot—a central motif in this body of work—becomes both sculptural and conceptual principle: a process that translates linear motion into spatial structure. The materials used—ceramic, cotton, aluminum—create trompe-l’œil effects that question the relationship between softness and hardness, decoration and function. In this way, Strobel creates complex object systems that operate as thought-figures—fragile equilibriums between order and chaos, presence and absence, visibility and meaning.

 

Architectures of the Imaginary and Material Mythologies  

Michael Hirschbichler works at the intersection of art, architecture, and anthropology. His projects investigate the interplay between built environments, natural landscapes, and the ideological, political, and cultural forces that shape them. The works shown in this exhibition are part of his long-term project Theatrum Orbis Terrarum , named after the first modern atlas by Abraham Ortelius (1527–1598). In this context, Hirschbichler combines classical means of architectural representation—such as plans, models, and perspectives—with speculative, often dystopian transformations. Through processes of mirroring, layering, scale-shifting, and repetition, he creates cartographic phantasmagorias—places suspended between fiction and reality. Monuments, cathedrals, prisons, bunkers, infrastructure buildings, and shopping centers overlap into dense spatial compositions, in which utopia and architectures of control become almost indistinguishable. A second, mythological dimension of space unfolds in Hirschbichler’s work. His drawings, paintings, sculptures, texts, and installations serve not just as media but as active transformational agents—sites where ideological ghosts, suppressed narratives, collective hopes and fears become visible. The artist constructs a complex semiotic cosmos in which past, present, and future interweave, and the boundaries between reality and imagination blur. His aim is not so much a rational decoding of the world as its poetic and visual reconstruction—as a fragmented, material mythology of the present.

 

In their formal and conceptual diversity, the three positions negotiate the central questions of the exhibition: space as a realm of possibility, as a conceptual structure, as a body. The Moon Is No Door opens not only metaphorical threshold spaces between inside and outside, but also sketches a poetic coordinate system of material, light, structure, and imagination.