Bringing together collages of radiographs by Lindsay Caldicott, staple sculptures by Tomomi Yamakawa, and collages on paper by John Armleder, this exhibition explores the transformation of fragments into new visual and material configurations. Working with everyday materials but with very distinct processes, the artists return to the same gestures every day, making repetition both a fundamental part of their artistic practice and a form of meditation.

Armleder’s collages bear witness to his Fluxus influence and early exploratory research. They reflect his experiments with chance, indeterminacy and various iconographic references. Yamakawa transforms ordinary stainless steel staples into delicate architectural structures with the quiet attentiveness of a Zen meditation, while Caldicott assembles fragments of photographs and radiographs into intricate, repetitive and fractal compositions.

John Armleder (CH, *1948)
Since his debut with the Fluxus group Ecart in the late 1960s, Armleder has synthesized divergent artistic traditions and currents, from appropriation and geometrical abstraction to music and performance. We present collages by John Armleder made nearly six decades apart, in 1967 and 2026. Through transfers, a spirit duplicator, stamps, stencils and cutouts, Armleder repeats and recombines (often by chance) numerous visual fragments. Together, they trace his sustained interest in what happens to a sign or a picture when it is copied, fragmented or combined.

Lindsay Caldicott (UK, Leicester, 1954 – Leicester, 2014)
Caldicott worked as a radiographer in a hospital in the Netherlands from 1978 to 1990, with a few years’ break to study fine art in London. All her life, she suffered from mental health difficulties and was diagnosed with schizophrenia and obsessive-compulsive disorder. She managed her troubles until a severe crisis in 1990 that forced her to quit her job at the age of 34. She then spent the next 24 years in a psychiatric hospital, where she produced her major body of work. Her collages are mainly made of X-ray fragments (and sometimes photographs), cut with a scalpel and assembled with surgical precision into geometric compositions where they interlock and repeat again and again with sudden disruptions, at once obsessively composed and highly disordered. Occasionally, architectural details, texts or figurative elements add to the dizzying play of forms. Lindsay Caldicott’s work is held in many collections, such as the French Photography Museum, Fondation Francès, Collection abcd/Bruno Decharme (Paris) and Collection Guy Delcourt (Paris).

Tomomi Yamakawa (JP, *1993, lives in Berlin)
Yamakawa graduated from the Städelschule in Frankfurt in 2021, after completing her undergraduate studies at Kyoto University of the Arts in 2016. In her practice, Yamakawa is interested in the poetics of daily life and how everyday objects interact with us in ways that go beyond functionalism. Since 2023, Yamakawa has been building her steel sculptures by hand from actual staples. Mass-produced, these humble fasteners are handled by Yamakawa with the care of someone working with precious metal. She joins blocks of staples into clusters in intricate sequences to shape geometric and architectural structures. In the Zen traditions of Japanese Buddhism, gardening, cleaning or tidying up are not only functional but are also active forms of spiritual practice, drawing attention away from daily preoccupations. Though small in scale, the sculptures are multidimensional and they exist as both interior and exterior spaces, each space holding its own complexity.