I first encountered Anna Fasshauer’s work in the gallery’s courtyard last year. Installed outdoors and created in uncoloured aluminium, the sculpture was exposed to weather, light, and the rhythms of the day and registered to me not as a separate art object, but as a presence embedded in the garden environment. Entering DONE!, Fasshauer’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, that first encounter became a point of comparison: what has now shifted and what has intensified?
The exhibition brings together freestanding aluminium sculptures and rectangular wall works arranged across the gallery space and outside. Welded, folded and compressed into angular forms linked by curving bends, the works sometimes echo everyday objects and industrial details, revealing creases, seams and dents beneath their coloured surfaces.
At the core of Fasshauer’s practice stands a physical confrontation between body, tool and material. Her sculptures emerge from repeated hammer strikes, from welding, bending and stressing aluminium until it yields. In her practice, the hammer, an archaic, heavily gendered tool, functions not as an instrument but as an extension of the body. The artist’s force and intent scar the metal with dents, folds and seams, turning the surface into an archive of labour and power, while the soft curves become a record of negotiation, where resistance and pliability coexist.
Her insistence on manual force places Fasshauer within a lineage of postwar and late-modern sculpture often dominated by men: the welded steel works of David Smith, the industrial assertiveness of Anthony Caro, the heroic rhetoric of material mastery that shaped much of twentieth-century sculpture. What distinguishes Fasshauer’s position is not an attempt at reversing that tradition, but her quiet insistence on occupying it differently. A woman working with metal and hammer inevitably raises questions about who was historically viewed as entitled to exert force, whose labour was read as expressive rather than functional and how metalwork has been culturally coded.
Meanwhile, in the production process, which is largely force-driven, welding plays a crucial role in negotiating the balance. The electric arc leaves marks that resemble stitches. These seams, binding fragments together, suggest care as much as force. Fire becomes less a destructive force than a connective element, introducing repair, continuity and vulnerability into the work’s physical logic.
Anna Fasshauer, DONE!, Fabienne Levy, 2026
Yet DONE! is not solely about power relations with the material. Fasshauer applies primary colours to surfaces that are visibly stressed and deformed. The colours make the sculptures more assertive and outward-facing, bridging the raw physicality of Fasshauer’s process with a visual language borrowed from modernist abstraction. They also introduce a degree of mediation: the gesture is no longer read only as the trace of impact, but also through composition that guides how the surface is seen. The question emerges as to whether colour sharpens the violence embedded in the work, or partially softens it, whether it disciplines the material or amplifies its resistance.
I spent some time observing how the sculptures placed in the gallery’s private courtyard interacted with the outer (yet still formally private) world. Their surfaces reflected shifting conditions and seemed to welcome them, allowing time, exposure and environment to register alongside the artist’s gestures. In this setting, the works appeared as active participants in a larger field of forces.
Anna Fasshauer, DONE!, Fabienne Levy, 2026
This stood in contrast to a more controlled encounter with the works inside the gallery. Nonetheless, a curatorial decision to colour some walls blue opened a dialogue between the art and the space. Against white walls, the human-sized sculptures might have seemed too disciplined within a cozy white cube gallery setting; against colour, they retained friction, presence, and contextual tension. This also allowed the wall-mounted works to assert their material presence, extending the conversation between surface and volume, so that the individual pieces cohere as an ensemble.
And while the title DONE! suggests finality, it instead marks a moment of arrival. Framing completion as forward-looking, the exhibition positions itself as an active phase within an evolving practice.
Anna Fasshauer, DONE!, Fabienne Levy, Rämistrasse 27, 8001 Zürich, 12 December 2025–28 February 2026