Dearest Gritli,

When we called last week in the early afternoon, I told you that I’d take you on a walk through Berlin’s Tiergarten and that I needed to check on the little water hen or coot family (not that I know anything about birds) – with their white dot on their heads, almost looking like majestic crowns, whose perfectly round nest I had discovered the day before. And how the trees had put on their best pink and white Sunday dresses for us, gracefully sprinkling Berlin with nature’s most beautiful confetti.

And you told me how ME/CFS, the autoimmune disease you were diagnosed with at 27 and that has since quietly redrawn the map of your life, means that your body struggles to distribute those tiny mitochondria that are supposed to feed every cell; how lying down becomes a necessity rather than a choice, how much you despise your bed for the borders it etches around your days.

Were you lying in bed there when you told me that?

And as I walked, your voice carried through the phone line, and I thought about the Gleichzeitigkeit between us: Two bodies, two states of being, time folding in strange ways, unfolding at the same time.

I sat down on a green bench. I spoke to you about the softness of the day and how every year I feel like I’m experiencing spring for the first time.

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You mentioned the pedagogy of Arno Stern and his jeu de peindre — the educator who, after working with war orphans in the 1940s, realised that given the right conditions — a protected space free from judgment and goals — children create a spontaneous visual language from inside themselves, finding eine natürliche Spur (a natural track) through feeling. You said that, in a way, this is close to what you are doing now: reaching for colour not through the mind, but through a sensing body, even when motion itself is so limited. How the dot paintings are not trophies, but survival traces, necessary companions – and how you would give all of them away without hesitation if a cure for ME/CFS were found.

You explained to me the meaning behind the title of your current solo exhibition, which brings together a recent series of your dot paintings at Neuer Essener Kunstverein – Militant Joy — a joy fought for on thin ice, surrounded by infinite sadness, a joy that must stand its ground militantly against a system that abandons the sick and worships health as a capitalist mean of productivity. You spoke, too, of crip time — how you try to bend temporality, to let it ripple out differently, to live not against the clock but beside it.

How the paintings are a form of Abtasten, a tactile exploration, a slow and careful Vergewissern, a re-assurance that colour, and thus life, continues.

I thought about how animals can sense bad weather before it arrives. How you, too, have always seemed able to sense shifts before the world names them, reading the pressure changes no one else can feel yet.

Your teacher Daniel Sinsel once said, ‘Your work is your life.’ It sounded like an empty slogan to me at first, but I think I understand it more now. The dots — they are not symbols of distance, but of proximity. Each point beside another, touching without merging—like the tender nearness of bodies—concerned, in that sense, with Nachbarschaften and adjacencies, much like your other bodies of work. I like my body when it is with your body (1). Not collision — but the gentle, careful coexistence of forms and colours, side by side. Just like Linnéa in Monet’s Garden (2), which your mother gave you when you were a child — a book about colours blooming slowly, almost secretly, if only you have the patience to sit still long enough.

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Didn’t someone once call your work neo-conceptual-impressionism? (3)

I pick a memory:

In the summer of 2003 (a summer that turned all previous summers into spring), my granddad promised my sister and me that he would give us twenty cents for every swollen mosquito bite we could show him. We immediately grabbed felt pens and circled every bump to make sure we didn’t miss even a teeny tiny round red mark until we looked like strange little Dalmatian creatures covered in violet-blue maps.

And I think of La Pimpa – the Italian children’s comic from the 1970s – a red-dotted dog moving through life with optimism and a certain clumsy grace — how her spots always made me laugh, how her innocence made the world lighter.

And now, your dots: they remind me of Blaue Flecken — bruises, yes, but also marks of endurance.

David Wojnarowicz said, 'If silence equals death, then art equals language equals life.’ Your dots are a language. Even when the body cannot move, your work travels, pulses outward, creating a language only you could have invented.

When we spoke of Anne Boyer’s Erotology I (4), you said something that stayed with me: how her writing feels at once universal and entirely personal, how she reaches a collective experience through the very specific. Your dots are like that, too. They are unmistakably birthed from your singular biography — yet, because of that, they belong to everyone.

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After a while, I stood up from the bench, the earth under my feet felt so soft it almost seemed to breathe.
I found a small crooked branch lying on the pathway and brought it home, placed it in a little milk jug filled with water.

Now the branch has started to blossom.

Each time I look at it, I think of you.
Of how life insists — quietly, stubbornly— even on the thinnest ice.

Peter Handke was right when he said: I write you a long letter because I had no time for a short one.

With all my love,
Leonie

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(1) E.E. Cummings.

(2) A children’s book by Christina Björk and Lena Anderson, 1985.

(3) FlashArt, Mitchell Anderson, artgenève 10th Edition: Always On the Mark, https://flash---art.com/2022/03/artgeneve/, last visited 28 April 2025.

(4) ‘Think of the way one person can make you feel, also the way that one person is only one. Why want that one person who is only, after all, one person, and why wake up longing for a person and fall asleep longing for the same person and who knows if anyone else in this is longing? You don’t know if that one person is longing, too.’ And then you mention how Jan Verwoert compared Pollocks drip gesture with Beyoncé using her own perfume, having the possibility to wear different layers of herself, making space for more than “one”. (Jan Verwoert, Why are conceptual artists painting again?, 2013).

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Gritli Faulhaber (b. 1990 Freiburg im Breisgau, DE) lives and works in Zürich. Solo and two-person exhibitions include Gauli Zitter; Brussels (2024), Theta ; New York (2024), Istituto Svizzero, Milan (2023); Galerie Nächst St. Stephan Rosemarie Schwarzwälder, Vienna (2023); BOOKS, Paris (2021); Sangt Hipolyt, Berlin (2020); Cherish, Geneva (2019). Recent group exhibitions include The Merode, Brussels (2025), Kunsthalle Zürich, Zürich (2023); Sweetwater, Berlin (2023); Theta, New York (2022); Swiss Art Awards, Basel (2022); Kunsthalle Friart Fribourg, Fribourg (2022); Artgenève, Geneva (2022); Fonda, Leipzig (2021); Galerie Lange + Pult, Zürich (2021); Kunsthaus Langenthal, Langenthal (2021); Kunstverein Leipzig, Leipzig (2020); Museum im Bellpark, Kriens (2020); Cité des Arts, Paris (2019). She is a 2022 recipient of the Swiss Art Award as well as the Working Grant of the City of Zürich.

Leonie Herweg (b. 1997 in Frankfurt, DE) is a curator and writer who lives between London and Berlin. She is the co-founder and director of GROTTO (Berlin), partner of Café Tiergarten (opening summer 2025, Berlin) and part of the editorial team of Zeitung Magazine (CH). She currently hosts a lecture series at Reference Point (London) inviting artists to share a work by another artists that has, over time, shaped, unsettled, or accompanied them.

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