Opening Reception: July 2, 2026 | 6 – 8 PM
On View: July 3 – August 29, 2026
July 2, 2026 (Berlin, Germany) – SOCIÉTÉ is delighted to present Kaspar Müller’s solo exhibition Boutique SOCIÉTÉ × Treasures of Memory 2, on view from July 3 – August 29, 2026. The exhibition brings together objects with a past and a price: things that have absorbed, over time, the projections, desires, and contradictions of the cultures that made them. Müller has long been drawn to the gap between what something appears to be and what it withholds, staging quotidian items in playful constellations that animate the material tension between their social lives and inner opacities: the interplay between an object’s “sensual surface” where meaning accrues and its inaccessible dimensions, which in Graham Harman’s words “resonate in cellars of being where no relation reaches.”
In Boutique SOCIÉTÉ, objects step out of the cellar and into the boutique. Two tents stand at the center of the exhibition. Provisional and portable, such humble constructions turn up everywhere from street markets and trade fairs to birthday parties and black-tie events. Installed indoors, these aluminum-framed structures become precarious rooms, aspirational stage sets dressed in new clothes: hand-painted transparent fabrics in cheerful dots and stripes cosplay as vernacular architectural couture. Display does not operate as a neutral frame here, but as an active force that reveals the object’s sensual surface while deepening the sense of what it withholds. Within these structures, lamp sculptures cast the warm light of a showroom or a home, their exuberant, discordant constellations of bulbs recycling the image of the old to fabricate the new. Hand-blown glass bongs, arranged on a slowly rotating pedestal, are singular in their making, yet ubiquitous in their use. Positioned at the intersection of craft and mass production, they are, as Müller suggests, vehicles for transformation of a state of mind. Cast aluminum tulips rest on miniature, 3D-printed paint-splattered chairs. This conflation of classical iconography with new materials invokes both the history of flower painting and the artist’s studio as well as the original financial bubble: seventeenth-century Dutch “tulip mania,” when flower bulbs became objects of delirious speculation. Suspended between sensuous surface and withdrawn essence, Müller’s scenography frames these objects as treasures of generalized memory, ubiquitous repositories of projected longing that circle the object without ever touching its core.
Müller’s paintings enact a similar oscillation between the personal and the inaccessible, treating the world of personal anecdotes just like objects. Memories of his childhood neighborhood, stolen cigarettes, and his father’s antiquarian bookshop were fed into an AI image generator, resulting in images that are at once generic and oddly precise: intimate enough to sting, yet impersonal enough to estrange.
NOTES TO EDITORS
Boutique SOCIÉTÉ x Treasures of Memory 2 by Kaspar Müller will be on view at SOCIÉTÉ from July 3 – August 29, 2026.
Address
Wielandstraße 26
10707 Berlin
Opening Reception
July 2, 2026 | 6 – 8 PM
Opening Hours
Tuesday – Saturday | 11 AM – 6 PM
Closed on Sundays and Mondays
About Kaspar Müller
Kaspar Müller (b. 1983, Schaffhausen) lives and works in Basel. His work is currently included in Hope as a Crutch, New Presentation of the Contemporary Art Collection at Museum zu Allerheiligen, Schaffhausen, and in Bocconi Art Gallery 2025 at Bocconi University, Milan. During Art Basel Parcours 2023 he showcased a large installation in Münsterplatz. Müller has had solo exhibitions at Atelier Amden, Vleeshal, Middelburg; Kunsthalle Bern; Museum im Bellpark, Kriens; Kunsthalle Zürich, Zurich; and Circuit, Centre d’Art Contemporain, Lausanne. He has participated in group exhibitions at Fondazione Prada, Venice; Casa Masaccio, San Giovanni Valdarno; Swiss Institute, New York; Istituto Svizzero di Roma, Rome; MAMCO, Geneva; and Aachener Kunstverein, Aachen, among other venues.
About SOCIÉTÉ:
SOCIÉTÉ is a Berlin-based contemporary art gallery with a global reach. The gallery’s bold curatorial approach plays a pivotal role in advancing its artists’ visions, supporting major museum exhibitions, biennials, and acquisitions by leading institutional collections worldwide. Operating in both the primary and secondary markets, SOCIÉTÉ provides curated advisory services to select clients.
Beyond its exhibitions, the gallery’s publishing initiative, EDITION SOCIÉTÉ, collaborates with prominent writers and graphic designers to produce artist books, catalogues, and, more recently, high-end artist editions.
SOCIÉTÉ is an active presence at major international art fairs, including Art Basel, Art Basel Paris, Art Basel Miami Beach, Frieze New York, Frieze London, ARCOmadrid, and Gallery Weekend Berlin.
Image credits:
1 – 2. Installation view of Kaspar Müller, Boutique SOCIÉTÉ x Treasures of Memory 2, at SOCIÉTÉ, Berlin. Courtesy of the artist and SOCIÉTÉ, Berlin. Photo: Trevor Good.