When limitations become the starting point

Anna Andreeva wanted to become an artist. The Soviet system had other plans. Born in 1917, she was denied the opportunity to pursue an art education and instead was required to work at the Red Rose Silk Factory in Moscow. It might have ended her artistic ambitions. Instead, the factory became part of them.

Andreeva began looking at the machinery, patterns and repetition of industrial textile production differently. From these rigid structures, she developed her own visual language, creating designs that gradually evolved into almost cybernetic forms. Her work eventually became associated with some of the iconic Soviet fabrics of the 1970s.

Works on paper by Andreeva from that decade, together with original silk fabrics from the 1960s and 70s, form one of three perspectives in Equilibrium, the current exhibition at Studio Naegeli in Gstaad.

Curated by Anna Högl, the exhibition brings Andreeva together with Swiss architects Trix and Robert Haussmann and artist Olga Tatarintsev. Their work looks very different, but all three practices begin, in one way or another, with a set of rules or limitations – and then see how far they can be pushed.

Playing with the rules
Trix and Robert Haussmann spent much of their careers doing precisely that.

The influential Swiss architects challenged one of modernism’s best-known principles: that form should follow function. Instead, they played with illusion, reflection and perception. In their Spiegel-Teppich-Objekte series, mirrors and carpets transform ordinary architectural elements and make it surprisingly difficult to trust what the eye is seeing.

Studio Naegeli is also showing Spacegrid, originally developed in 1986 and reproduced in 2025 for Zurich Design Week.

Outside, the idea takes on another dimension. The large-scale mirrored sculpture Equilibrium from 2024 reflects its surroundings, so the work changes according to where you stand, what is around it and even what the weather is doing. Rather than placing an object against the landscape, the landscape becomes part of the object itself. The work is presented in collaboration with Herald St Gallery in London.

The third perspective comes from Olga Tatarintsev. Her Limitation of Sound series starts where conventional language reaches its boundaries. Sound, rhythm and repetition are instead translated into abstract compositions and colour – another attempt to find a different means of expression when the usual one is no longer sufficient.

The title Equilibrium therefore applies less to how the works look than to the common ground between them: the balance between order and imagination, restriction and freedom.

Andreeva perhaps makes that idea clearest of all. Given a factory rather than an art school, she found an artistic vocabulary among the machines.å

Equilibrium | Where: Studio Naegeli, Gstaad | When: Until 13 September 2026 | by appointment