A bed stands in the center of Paris gallery Sans titre’s booth at Art Basel Paris. From a distance, it might be mistaken for a normal bed, albeit more brightly colored and decorative than usual. Closer inspection reveals, however, that we’re looking at something infinitely more fragile. This bed is crafted from paper, covered entirely in tightly packed scribbles embedded with intricate designs.

The work, entitled Lit de sirène (2024), or “Mermaid bed,” is by German-born, Salzburg-based artist Agnes Scherer, and marks the third (and, according to the artist, last) such paper bed as well as her first work in red ( blue and green had respectively been her hues).  The titular mermaid of the work is depicted to scale lying in the bed, head propped up on the headboard as though it were three-dimensional. This gesture, together with the thin, flat planes of paper that comprise the sculpture, destabilizes easy understanding of the work’s dimensionality.

Agnes Scherer, Lit de sirèn (2024). Photo: Pauline Assathiany. Courtesy of the artist and Sans titre, Paris.

“They’re all made of paper and they’re quite fragile and very lightweight objects that you could never rest on, and that’s important to me,” said Scherer via video call earlier this month. “I think it’s important that it is clearly only a representation.”

Despite—or perhaps because of—the clear quality of the facsimile across all three beds, the creation of a bed inherently prompts bodily projection, that is, imagining oneself in it, where head and feet go, considerations of one’s weight and mass and how it might collapse this bed’s delicate form. Beyond the physical, the bed contains its own metaphoric and memory-related connotations, which act as the conceptual bedrock of Lit de sirène.

Agnes Scherer, detail of Lit de sirèn (2024). Photo: Pauline Assathiany. Courtesy of the artist and Sans titre, Paris.

Scherer noted, “The bed is an existential place. It’s an object, but it’s also a place in people’s lives where people suffer through sorrow and sickness, or maybe even childbirth and death. And that place can also be a carrier of imagery.”

Focus on the body, both real and symbolic, has a rich and storied history, and here Scherer deftly taps this tradition and makes bodily associations inescapable. Beyond the more direct references above is the mark-making that covers every square inch of the bed, imperfect and readily evoking the hand of the artist. Scherer uses felt tip markers and frenetically scribbles across the surface, leaving irregularities, subtle recurring curves and crosshatching, and oversaturated patches where the pen strokes erroneously overlap. For Scherer, scribbling in an almost “frenzy” allows for her intuition to take the lead, recalling Surrealist automatism.

Agnes Scherer. Photo: Catherine Peter. Courtesy of Sans titre, Paris.

Beyond these qualities are the pictorial elements, namely the reclining mermaid but also floral designs, a stylized portrait above the head of the mermaid and a sort of trompe l’oeil plate hanging from it by a chain, as well as decorative trims. Scherer’s beds reference a type of richly painted Austrian bed frames she has encountered since moving to Salzburg, that feature elaborate compositions on the larger panels and repeated motifs (usually of various flora) that allude to cultural symbols. Scherer’s stylistic rendering of various motifs recalls this type of symbolism—but for her, she is less concerned with a codified lexicon of symbology than an avenue to explore and play with subjective picture-making.

Scherer explained, “Another part that is important to me is how you can organize pictorial content on a bed because depending on where the pictorial content is, for instance, if it’s painted on the surface where normally a body would rest, this has a different connotation than if something is placed inside the canopy or on the footboard, which is where a person in the bed would normally look towards. So, there is a kind of inherent rhetoric in that placement that you can play with.”

Installation view of “Agnes Scherer: Savoir Vivre” (2023/24). Photo: Marjorie Brunet Plaza. Courtesy of the artist and ChertLüdde, Berlin.

The debut of Lit de sirène at Art Basel Paris follows an incredibly busy year so far for Scherer. She has been the subject of three solo shows across three countries. While each of these gallery shows highlighted Scherer’s distinctive style and aesthetic, they differed in unique and striking ways, illuminating the magnitude of her creative scope.

Left: Agnes Scherer, Blush Chart (2024), right: Trousseau dérangé 1 (2022). Photo: Marjorie Brunet Plaza. Courtesy of the artist and ChertLüdde, Berlin.

The first of these, “Savoir Vivre” at ChertLüdde, Berlin, saw Scherer create a life-size medieval jousting tournament, a monumental installation featuring more than a dozen individually crafted figures and a pair of horses, as well as the first iteration of her paper beds, Trousseau dérangé (2022).

Following, and perhaps the most physically dynamic, was “Woe and Awe” at Sadie Coles HQ, comprised of paintings, sculpture, and dioramas that, bound together in the manner of a great tome, functioned within the show and accompanying performance as a continuously progressing stage-set. The show also allowed Scherer to collaborate once again with musician Tobias Textor, who scored a performance that saw performers use the dioramas in a manner akin to stage props. As viewers circumvented the works and traversed the exhibition, varying vantage points offered new associations and frameworks of reflection.

Performance view of “Agnes Scherer and Tobias Textor: Woe and Awe” (2024). Photo: Arthur Gray. Courtesy of the artist and Sadie Coles HQ, London.

Last among the gallery shows, and on view through November 16, 2024, is “Strawfires” at Meyer Kainer, Vienna, curated by Eva Birkenstock. Here, Scherer interrogates the history and visual culture surrounding Marie Antoinette, replete with a sculpture featuring the historical figure with her head in a lavishly decorated and uncannily pretty guillotine. Speaking to the cohesiveness of Scherer’s creative vision, the figurative sculpture of Marie Antoinette was originally made in 2019, but has now been reconfigured and recontextualized within the narrative of “Strawfires.”

Across these shows, Scherer interrogates, in a manner that could perhaps best be described as poetically, themes around the reciprocity between historical and contemporary systems, the stratification of societies, and economies of value. Ever playful and often picturesque, just beneath the surface of Scherer’s work is something rather unsettling, a suggestion that the way things are could have, and maybe can, be different—from the minutia of what we see when lying in bed to the macroscopic forward march of world history.

As for what’s next for Scherer, fortunately, she says there is a brief respite for her to spend researching and developing new ideas before any forthcoming deadlines. As for how she approaches these new projects—whether fairs or shows—the main driving principle is, “It has to matter.”