Aoa;87 presents the exhibition Morpheus mango mau by Helga Schmidhuber on the occasion of Berlin Art Week 2025. The opening will take place on September 11.

We also invite you to a talk with journalist, biologist, and philosopher Cord Riechelmann.

Cord Riechelmann combines natural observation with theoretical reflection: his topics range from urban ecology to the cultural history of the animal. He writes regularly for Faz/Fas, Merkur and az, teaches at the Berlin University of the Arts, and is the author of Crows. A portrait.

Helga Schmidhuber’s painting moves between myth, dream, and organic materiality. Her works unfold into fragmentary, open landscapes where meanings shimmer, horizons dissolve, and instinct overrides logic. They form probing, open constellations that can never be fully deciphered.

At the heart of her practice lies transformation: dissolving boundaries, making transitions visible, and tracing archaic energies—not as a nostalgic return, but as a radical experience of the present. Her process is experimental, sensuous, and deeply informed by synaesthetic perception and a fascination with biodiversity, natural forms, and their pictorial translation.

In her current cycle Morpheus, predators, birds, and traces of micro-life encounter one another—not in confrontation, but in a paradoxical, peaceful coexistence. What in nature appears as a tension becomes, in her paintings, a fragile balance. Painting here becomes a stage of simultaneous states: danger and beauty, presence and distance, waking and dreaming. The works shimmer and vibrate—like moments just before awakening. The title, not coincidentally, refers to Morpheus, the ancient god of sleep.

The spectrum of her work ranges from delicate miniatures to large-scale canvases. Time and again, her practice extends beyond the panel painting into space: the installation-like is a central element of her oeuvre—an attempt to transform image, object, and environment into permeable, breathing states.