The sisters Claudia & Julia Müller explore the construction of memory and its role in our relationship with the world. They each bring their own subjectivity to bear on their joint creative process, which dialectically approaches feelings of familiarity and foreignness, childhood and mysticism, and the place of mankind in the cosmos. They work with a range of media, including drawing, video, murals, and large installations, arranging or juxtaposing images from their own individual surroundings and the museum collections before reinterpreting them in paintings.

Der weiche Blick is German for “the soft gaze”. It is a form of meditation focusing perception on an indeterminate, in-between space. As a form of optical illusion, it also allows two-dimensional images to be “seen” in three dimensions. The exhibition plays with a form of mimicry: from one space to the next, the subjects are reinterpreted, changing style and creating an interplay of image perception. The large figures painted with a light touch yield to subjects drawn with a firmer hand. The pairs are similar and symmetrical, mirroring each other yet strikingly different, as they enter into dialogue with the nearby paintings by Jenny Eckhardt and drawings by Léopold Robert.

Claudia & Julia Müller were born in 1964 and 1965 respectively in Basel. They have been working together since 1992. Claudia divides her time between Basel and Geneva, Julia lives and works in Basel and Berlin.

The exhibition was made possible thanks to the support of the Ernst & Olga Gubler-Habluetzel Stiftung and the Fondation Nestlé pour l’Art.