EN HIVER
Ludwig Dressler, Ossian Fraser, Sophie Schweighart
5. December 2025 - 7. Februar 2026
OPENING 4 December | 6 – 9pm
EN HIVER brings together three artists whose works share a heightened sensitivity to weight, fragility, and the fleeting nature of the moment. At its core, the exhibition reflects on time and memory, and on the vulnerable presence that defines human experience.
In Ossian Fraser’s large-scale balloon works, we encounter a paradoxical materiality: monumental balloons, reaching up to four meters in height—black, weightless, almost cosmic—occupy public space. Hovering above the roof of the Bayerischer Hof in Munich, they appear in nocturnal photographs as entities that are at once massive and fragile. They evoke celestial bodies, black suns, objects that resist earthly classification.
Within the gallery, The Subject Of The Air is presented as a triptych, shown from differing perspectives. This threefold configuration opens up a space suggestive of another dimension: perception is unsettled and simultaneously expanded, as though the balloon cannot be grasped from a single viewpoint, but only unfolds its presence through the interplay of three angles. What emerges is an image-body suspended between reality and the unknown.
Another work depicts a white weather balloon hovering above the crypt of Heinrich Heine in Munich’s Poet’s Garden—like an oversized, enigmatic egg, captured in the suspended moment between ascent and descent.
Fraser’s balloons function as metaphors of transition. They move between visibility and invisibility, between physical weight and metaphysical boundlessness. They mark places without attaching themselves to them—silent emissaries of a universe that appears both unfathomable and touchingly close.
With the series Nothing is real but okay, Sophie Schweighart turns her attention to a site that is at once banal and profoundly human: the so-called “fake bus stop”—a pseudo stop installed in many care facilities for people living with dementia. Equipped with a bus stop sign, a fictional timetable, and sometimes a simple bench, it imitates everyday infrastructure without ever fulfilling its function. No bus will ever arrive here, no journey will begin—yet these places open up a space that often feels closer to an inner truth than any functioning system of transport.
For people with dementia, whose short-term memory becomes increasingly fragile and whose present is ever more saturated with memories, these bus stops possess a consoling logic. Many long to return to a familiar place, often the site of their childhood, or follow deeply ingrained rituals anchored in bodily memory. The fake bus stop offers precisely what reality no longer can: the promise of returning home. Often, a brief moment of waiting is enough for restlessness to subside, for the original impulse to leave to dissolve into the fog of memory. Some return to the care facility convinced they have embarked on, or even completed a journey.
Schweighart takes this paradoxical gesture—the bus stop as a threshold between fiction and existential truth, as the starting point of her artistic practice. Her photographs and installations reveal how time, identity, and space shift at these sites. The fake bus stop becomes a poetic focal point of a condition in which the past becomes present and the present gently dissolves.
Schweighart photographs these stops in fog or at night, creating an atmosphere that is both estranged and deeply evocative. By placing the modest architecture of these sites at the center of her work, Schweighart exposes the fragility of human orientation and the tender, often overlooked longing for home, belonging, and stability. Her works open a space of quiet empathy—a meditation on what memory truly is, and on how we accompany one another when it begins to disintegrate.
Ludwig Dressler investigates the everyday gestures of the digital age: swiping, zooming, and scrolling across smartphone screens. His light boxes and photographs isolate these fleeting actions and translate them into an unfamiliar, condensed materiality—making the ephemeral visible and physically perceptible.
The smooth, reflective surfaces of the pinch_inverted series produce distorted reflections of both the viewer and the surrounding space. The environment appears fractured, stretched, or displaced—as though one were looking into a digital membrane that fragments reality while simultaneously reflecting it back. Space itself seems drawn into the gesture.
At the same time, the hand that originally performs the digital movement dissolves within these surfaces. It merges with them, becoming a blurred trace, a hybrid entity between body and device. The boundary between human and technology erodes; the hand becomes part of the system it operates, as if it had migrated into the digital surface itself.
This is particularly striking in Dressler’s three-dimensional photographs: the gesture of the fingers causes the photographic paper itself to bulge. The physical surface begins to bend, as though following the digital movement. The gesture inscribes itself as a sculptural deformation into the image, revealing how intimately body and medium are intertwined.
In this way, Dressler transforms the fleeting micro-gestures of everyday life into fragile sculptures of light, reflection, distortion, and movement. His works reveal how deeply embedded we are in our digital actions—and how quietly, almost imperceptibly, our own self-image shifts along with them. One work from the pinch_ series has been acquired by the Collection for Time-Based Media at the Pinakothek der Moderne (headed by Franziska Kunze) and will be shown there in a group exhibition in July 2025.
Ludwig Dressler (b. 1998, Munich) explores the impact of digital media on human perception and behavior. Working across photography, video, and 3D animation, his practice combines technical precision with aesthetic clarity. He frequently uses his own body—particularly his hand—to investigate the tension between physical presence and technological abstraction.
Ossian Fraser (b. 1983, Edinburgh) captures fleeting moments through materials such as water, dust, and light. His site-specific interventions in both urban and natural environments reveal the latent potential of everyday situations. Fraser’s work merges sculpture, performance, and photography, documenting brief yet resonant compositions that examine the relationship between architecture, nature, and the ephemerality of the moment.
Sophie Schweighart (b. 1991, Munich) is a media artist who intertwines cinematic and physical realities. Her interactive works question perception and power structures by dissolving the boundaries between reality and performance. Through installations and performances, Schweighart invites critical reflection on established orders, combining narrative depth with spatial presence to create new forms of interaction.