Previous spotlight: Vienna-based artist Ines Freida Försterling and Frankfurt-based curator Paula Maß.
A playful approach to socially sensitive issues and cultural prejudices lies at the heart of Ines Frieda Försterling’s artistic practice. Working across a variety of media, her works unfold multiple layers of meaning beneath a (linguistically) humorous, seemingly simple, and childlike aesthetic. This impression emerges through her appropriation of motifs, materials, and sometimes also styles that originally belong to the world of childhood play. In this way, the artist creates spaces for reflection in which social norms, power relations, and notions of truth are unsettled.
Lies are trending. At least deepfakes, fake news, and even statements by the President of the United States convey this impression of our present moment. Perhaps the most famous liar in popular culture is Pinocchio: the wooden figure with the growing nose and the desire to become a “real” boy. Carlo Collodi invented his story in the nineteenth century as a bourgeois pedagogical lesson about the “proper” way of growing up. At the expense of his playful side, Pinocchio was expected to behave honestly, obediently, and with self-control in order to fulfill his longing to become human. To this day, such values continue to be associated with “reasonable” adulthood. Within the context of our performance-oriented “disciplinary society”[1], they are regarded as supposedly desirable norms.
Against this backdrop, Försterling’s clay-formed Pinocchio also appears in a new light. The sculpture entitled Look what grew in our garden, mom! (2026) does not seem as though its protagonist has achieved his goal of humanization. Nevertheless, the figure smiles cheerfully. Its hand-shaped form resembles, as the title suggests, a spiky plant, making Pinocchio appear still connected to his original wooden nature. Perhaps the artist is pointing here to the human misconception that we can detach ourselves from (our own) nature. At the same time, the shimmering black ceramic glaze evokes associations with oil-covered flora and fauna, opening another possible reading that points toward human-made environmental disasters. Then again, perhaps this grinning Pinocchio is simply delighted that he, like the artist herself, is allowed to keep playing. Försterling frequently brings into focus the increasingly strained relationship between humanity and nature in an age marked by escalating ecological crises. At the same time, she destabilizes established notions of artistic media and social hierarchies through the use of childlike and playful elements. In her work Blue (2025), she engages with the tradition of Color Field painting, which has historically often been understood as a contemplative concentration on color and form while largely excluding sociopolitical content. By arranging recycled fuse beads into color fields, the artist unsettles this male dominated tradition while simultaneously drawing attention to resource consumption and ecological awareness. In her works, the focus is never solely on form and color, but always also on social references and conceptual questions. This is also evident in her recent work No more lies (2026), in which textual elements made of felt are mounted on a frame covered with tulle and adorned with colorful pins from a pegboard toy for children. These three works selected for forma are, in total, characteristic of the artistic practice of Försterling, who furthermore creates drawings and develops participatory installations.
Already the philosopher Herbert Marcuse contrasted the ideal of the rational “homo faber” with play as a space of individual freedom against the capitalist logic of performance and work.[2] Försterling builds upon this idea by activating a childhood shaped sphere of experience that is familiar to many without lapsing into nostalgia. Within play, norms, expectations, and attributions lose their apparent self-evidence and become perceptible as changeable. It is precisely here that the particular relevance of her art resides. In a present shaped by ecological, political, and social crises, the artist opens up spaces for alternative perspectives on the world. The playful thus appears not as a form of escapism, but as a critical practice which allows the possibility of questioning existing conditions and imagining new ways of thinking and living together.
[1]Vgl. Marcuse, Herbert: Triebstruktur und Gesellschaft. Ein philosophischer Beitrag zu Sigmund Freud, Frankfurt/Main 1980.
[2]The concept of the disciplinary society originates from Michel Foucault, who uses it to describe a modern form of the exercise of power in which people are no longer controlled through direct violence, but through subtle surveillance, normalization, and disciplinary practices within institutions (such as prisons, but also schools or factories).
Vgl. Foucault, Michel: Überwachen und Strafen. Die Geburt des Gefängnisses, Frankfurt/Main 2019.
