Agnès Wyler – Let’s Face the Music Together: Softness Moves Mountains
On View at Nieves in Zurich, June 2025
Agnès Wyler transforms the nine members of the Barbapapa family into ten hand-sculpted ceramic figures – one for each character, and an additional figure that offers a quiet presence, open to interpretation. Each figure is paired with a ceramic scene named after actual playgrounds from around the world – abstract imaginaries shaped by the resonance of their titles rather than by their physical forms. Blending pop iconography with tactile practice, the exhibition reflects on memory, form, and the porous boundary between imagination and the built environment.
Originally conceived in the 1970s by Annette Tison and Talus Taylor, the Barbapapas exemplified adaptability and emotional fluidity. As notions of family shift toward more flexible forms, the Barbapapas resonate with renewed relevance – offering a vision of resilient, empathetic kinship that continues to challenge and expand conventional boundaries today.
They were, in their very essence, problem solvers and lifesavers, embodying the creativity and care necessary to navigate and transform difficulty – an ever-relevant model in today’s complex world. In channeling this spirit, Wyler translates their adaptable ethos into ceramic form – grounding their mutability in a medium historically tied to domesticity and care, and increasingly reclaimed as a space for resistance and embodied knowledge.
Each piece translates lived experience into shape, rhythm, and chromatic nuance. The malleability of the original characters becomes a sculptural language – subtle, resilient, and intimate. By referencing the overlooked terrain of playgrounds, her work reconnects these forms to everyday spaces of interaction, unspoken histories, and collective memory.
In a time marked by digital fragmentation and the privatization of public space, Wyler’s ceramics foreground material presence and shared attention. By situating her figures within a landscape of informal play, she challenges and resists urban disconnection, reaffirming alternative ways of inhabiting and experiencing the city.
The exhibition sketches a delicate cartography of the urban environment – an affective topography shaped by recollection, invention, and the gestures of childhood reimagined.
On View at Nieves in Zurich, June 2025
Agnès Wyler transforms the nine members of the Barbapapa family into ten hand-sculpted ceramic figures – one for each character, and an additional figure that offers a quiet presence, open to interpretation. Each figure is paired with a ceramic scene named after actual playgrounds from around the world – abstract imaginaries shaped by the resonance of their titles rather than by their physical forms. Blending pop iconography with tactile practice, the exhibition reflects on memory, form, and the porous boundary between imagination and the built environment.
Originally conceived in the 1970s by Annette Tison and Talus Taylor, the Barbapapas exemplified adaptability and emotional fluidity. As notions of family shift toward more flexible forms, the Barbapapas resonate with renewed relevance – offering a vision of resilient, empathetic kinship that continues to challenge and expand conventional boundaries today.
They were, in their very essence, problem solvers and lifesavers, embodying the creativity and care necessary to navigate and transform difficulty – an ever-relevant model in today’s complex world. In channeling this spirit, Wyler translates their adaptable ethos into ceramic form – grounding their mutability in a medium historically tied to domesticity and care, and increasingly reclaimed as a space for resistance and embodied knowledge.
Each piece translates lived experience into shape, rhythm, and chromatic nuance. The malleability of the original characters becomes a sculptural language – subtle, resilient, and intimate. By referencing the overlooked terrain of playgrounds, her work reconnects these forms to everyday spaces of interaction, unspoken histories, and collective memory.
In a time marked by digital fragmentation and the privatization of public space, Wyler’s ceramics foreground material presence and shared attention. By situating her figures within a landscape of informal play, she challenges and resists urban disconnection, reaffirming alternative ways of inhabiting and experiencing the city.
The exhibition sketches a delicate cartography of the urban environment – an affective topography shaped by recollection, invention, and the gestures of childhood reimagined.