Plastic foil wrapped around white tulips acts as a thin, protective membrane between the transient flowers and the harsh outside world. It is a familiar image at petrol stations, food stores and florists alike, with white tulips symbolising purity, forgiveness and remembrance. At sites of mourning, flowers packaged in cellophane and sold next to memorial candles in shops in front of cemeteries become part of comforting yet bewildering little capitalist shrines of grief.

Cellophane, the title of Monika Grabuschnigg's first solo show at the Studio of Galerie Brugger, speaks to the artist's central concern: preservation under late capitalism, the desire to escape the signs of time and, ultimately, its unstoppable passing. Care and control shimmer through her work, alongside a sense of melancholia. Fridges, minibars, artificial tears and tissue boxes recur as projection surfaces for contradictory yet interdependent human impulses: the desire to preserve while ignoring our own mortality.

These objects at times become sites where Grabuschnigg inserts photographs from her personal archive, intensifying their inherent loneliness. They hold a spectrum of feelings captured in mundane moments, feelings that might once have been metabolised through faith and religious rituals. Here, in a secularised contemporary consumer culture, Grabuschnigg uncovers how objects have become repositories and temporary remedies for longing and emptiness.

The ceramic reliefs, casts of ubiquitous hotel mini-bar doors ('Cold Storage', 2023–ongoing) and fridges from single-person households ('Single Fridge', 2022–ongoing), hold fleeting traces of human presence on their surfaces: three dried roses, a love necklace left behind and white tulips in plastic wrap. 'Single Fridge (Stockpile)' depicts memorial candles casually lined up in a shop, collapsing the distinction between consolation and commerce. Alongside the question of vulnerability, ceramic tissue boxes glazed with platinum lustre turn an everyday object for tears and bodily fluids into a radiant reminder of small remedies and simple moments of empathy.

'Cold Storage (Reserve)' shifts towards the extreme end of preservation under the urgency of the present. A glimpse into a prepper box reveals what might become necessary: iodine tablets and mouthwash, lip balm alongside portion-sized Nutella, doomsday preparations scaled down to miniature. An acute awareness emerges in Grabuschnigg's work of the fragility of our collective state of mind: hedonistic, perhaps understandably so, in the face of eroding democratic structures and overlapping crises. Piece by piece, Grabuschnigg unveils a collective melancholy, palpable as grief for a once-promised future that never seems to arrive.

– Maja Lisewski, 2026