Karoline Schreiber
at Oberer Rheinweg 69

To draw as a way of living, this is perhaps the closest way to describe Karoline Schreiber’s approach to drawing. For Schreiber, drawing is not simply a medium, but a daily ritual: a physical necessity, a workout of the hand, and a way of keeping the subconscious in motion. Her automatic drawings emerge from this continuous practice, as unfiltered fragments of thought, half-remembered dreams, conversations once spoken or perhaps only imagined.

In Room Within, Schreiber invites us into an inner space where images unfold according to their own logic. Guided by subconscious gesture, her lines move instinctively across the paper, merging abstraction with realism, humans with animals, objects with impossible companions. Worlds collide without asking permission. What appears familiar quickly becomes strange; what seems abstract begins to resemble a body, a landscape, a room, or a memory.

The exhibition builds a bridge between Drawing Account, Schreiber’s ongoing series of large-scale pencil drawings begun in 2016, and New Series, a newer body of work, in which color enters more boldly. In the former, figurative works, domestic spaces, furniture, faces, shadows, and hybrid forms appear as if staged inside a dream. They are precise and atmospheric, humorous and unsettling at once. In the new series, the image moves toward the abstract and architectural: dense masses of felt-tip pen, ink, and colored pencil gather into vibrating fields, organic structures, and bodily forms. Lines accumulate until they seem almost alive, creating surfaces that pull the viewer inward.

Throughout the exhibition, openings appear. Sometimes they are literal gaps left inside a drawing; sometimes they are areas of untouched paper, pale thresholds within darker forms. Schreiber often leaves parts of her works unfinished, allowing emptiness to remain active. These spaces are not absences, but portals - small interruptions through which another reality seems to press forward. They create the sensation of being invited inside the drawing, as though one might cross the surface and enter the artist’s inner world.

This feeling runs through both the figurative and abstract works. In the pencil drawings, we enter rooms that feel psychologically charged, familiar yet altered. In the new abstract works, a small opening within a dense body of felt-tip lines can have a similar effect: the viewer is drawn into the image, almost becoming one line among many, absorbed into a complex and living structure.

Balancing humor, unease, and the surreal, Room Within presents drawing as a form of inner architecture. Each work becomes a chamber of thought, a space where gesture gives shape to emotion, where memory mutates into image, and where the subconscious is allowed to build its own room.

About the Artist

Karoline Schreiber is a Swiss artist born in Bern in 1969, now living and working in Zurich. She studied at the School for Design in Bern and later completed a Master of Arts in Fine Arts at Zurich University of the Arts. Since 2001, she has also taught at Bern University of the Arts. Her practice spans drawing, painting, performance, artist books, and actions, with drawing often at the center of her work as both image-making and live process.

Schreiber has exhibited widely in Switzerland and internationally, including solo presentations at Centre culturel suisse in Paris, Stadtgalerie Bern, Haus für Kunst Uri, Gluri Suter Huus, and Galerie Duflon/Racz. Her work has also appeared in group exhibitions at institutions such as the Swiss Institute in New York, MASS MoCA, Helmhaus Zürich, Museum Haus Konstruktiv, Kunstmuseum Thun, and Drawing Now in Paris. She has received numerous awards, grants, and residencies, including the Swiss Design Award, residencies in Krakow, New York, and Zurich, as well as grants from the City and Canton of Zurich.

Her works are represented in public and private collections including the City of Zurich, Canton of Zurich, Collection Schweizerische Mobiliar, Kunstverein Biel, and the Contemporary Art Society, UK.

About the Curators

Simmy Swinder Voellmy and Maria Richner are two independent curators who, on special occasions, join forces to present to a wider audience an artist they jointly believe in. They have very Swiss names, and equally un-Swiss beginnings. Together they bring a little bit of Basel, a little bit of Zurich, and a lot of fun.