Kaspar Müller’s solo exhibition Boutique Société × Treasures of Memory 2 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, 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 Suspended between sensuous surface and withdrawn essence, Müller’s scenography frames these objects as treasures of generalized memory, ubiquitous repositories of projected longing that circle the object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.