Birgit Megerle, Michaela Meise, Helena Huneke
Le passage
Exhibition September 4 – October 3, 2026
Special opening hours during DC Open
Saturday, September 5, 2026 / 1 – 7 pm
Sunday, September 6, 2026 / 1 – 5 pm
JUBG
Stoff-Pavillon Moeller
Hahnenstrasse 8
50667 Cologne
Part of DC OPEN 2026
www.dc-open.de
The street guides the flaneurs into a vanished time.
– Das Passagen-Werk, Walter Benjamin
I’ m just looking.
– The flaneuse in Casual Shopper, Judith Barry
In Judith Barry’s 1981 video work, Casual Shopper, the opening scene is filmed over the shoulder of a woman as she intently gazes at a spread of black and white photos of men wearing neckties. Zooming out, we see her standing in the magazine section of a shopping center. We follow the woman, perfectly styled in a sort of 1980s Working Girl look, as she meanders through the mall, embedded in its illusory space while using it as a counterpart to her own desires. Later we follow her on to the street, tottering elegantly in too-high heels, merging with the constructed
backdrop of a suburban street.
I had to think of this work when visiting Birgit Megerle in her Berlin studio, the large-scale grisaille paintings propped up like a scenography of figures in a phantastical architecture, she and I amongst them. Like Barry, Megerle folds elements from fashion, advertising, film and art history in her works, but in contrast uses them as a mere occasion to engage with painting. For instance: the men in the balustrade, The Dorians (2026). Maybe the starting point was from a men’s magazine from the seventies, but painterly tools of composition, stroke, chance become a sort of renegade player within a visual narrative that can upend, deconstruct, charm with a non-conclusive refinement. It remains deadpan—nonchalant— as if the scene were totally rational.
Helena Huneke’s untitled computer collage (1999) comes from a time when she and Megerle were young artist-comrades in Akademie Isotrop (1996-2000) in Hamburg. Made in the same year the French activist collective Tiqqun first published Preliminary Materials for a Theory of a Young-Girl, the found images could
be archetypes for the co-option of femininity in consumer society. The edges do not blend the personas into a coherent whole, but more suggest a subjectivity of ‘being torn‘. Still, the transposition seems spontaneous, an experiment made using early
tools of computer software.
Posing between artwork and craft, Becher (2024/2026) by Michaela Meise might indeed be used as vessels for drinking. In their method and aesthetic, they resemble not so much commodities as artifacts. Was the original user a caveman or a queen? Arranged in a storefront window with debris of shopping or everyday life, the patina of use and material exchange become sculptural elements. In the small figure Mit Katze, reciprocity of touch is there, but also: caregiving portrayed in an artwork for sale — in this form it can finally be paid for.
The exhibit’s location of the defunct Stoff-Pavillon Moeller might be imagined as a post-war Schauplatz of opulence and light, a place where predominantly women (cashiers, secretaries, wealthy housewives, who else?) could encounter a fractured city and emerging conflict zone of desires and interests. All three artists ’ works navigate the entanglement of presentation, production and consumption.
Megan Francis Sullivan, August 2026