How do we come to love something? Through repetition, through chance, through habit? Perhaps through a recurring motif – a form that stays with us – a colour that resonates – a detail that imprints itself on our memory. Or perhaps through the unexpected – a fleeting impulse that flashes up and then disappears again. Preferences move between habit and surprise – between the familiar and the unsettling. They render the banal meaningful, the obvious secondary – and reveal how we perceive, what touches us, and what matters to us. Favourite things are never neutral, never accidental – they always tell of ourselves, of patterns, of decisions.

Winnie Seifert paints with a lightness that is at once precise and impulsive. Colours flow and overlap, lines dissolve into abstraction, apparent motifs emerge only to transform again – much like our experience of watching clouds. Animals, plants, fleeting shapes, fragments of thought – everything merges into compositions oscillating between intuition and structure. Her works create spaces for associations of one’s own, for memories, for small surprises: one thinks, one recognises, one feels – and suddenly the picture shifts again. Winnie Seifert’s works are not finished answers, but open questions.

In her ceramic practice, Sarah Pschorn draws on a wide pool of forms and design elements, whose origins range from the Baroque to the present day. At times lush and ornate, at times fragile and delicate, defined yet organically flowing, her sculptures are situated on the threshold between vessel and free abstract creation. With great sensitivity, she turns supposed details into opulent, graceful structures that play with contrasting surface textures: a parade unfolds in all directions, from porous, archaic terracotta tones to gentle pastels in richly detailed porcelain, alongside found objects, shimmering lustre, and splendid gold.

We encounter some of the artists’ favourite things in the exhibition These are a few of my favourite things. In her new works, Sarah Pschorn engages with motifs and details that have long accompanied her – and us as well. Hearts, flowers, or shells can be found in almost every home, whether on a shower curtain or on wallpaper. Her ceramic showpieces play with precisely these cherished forms, volumes, and movements. Winnie Seifert’s paintings open up a space for thought, which is further expanded by the wall painting. A dialogue emerges – of material, colour, form, and light – between the static and the dynamic. Every surface, every stroke is a small clue to preferences, or a small step towards discoveries and reflections of one’s own.

And so preferences remain – mobile, fluid, changeable. They show themselves in traces – in forms, in colours, in strokes – in moments that impress themselves and then fade again. They open up spaces – between perception and memory – between intuition and reflection – between the known and the surprising.

The exhibition title These are a few of my favourite things refers to the song of the same name, performed by Julie Andrews in the 1950s and 1960s in the musical and later the film The Sound of Music, and which we now hear again in the series Wednesday. Some preferences manage to resurface across decades and generations, transcending national borders time and again.

And in the end, the question remains: What traces do we ourselves leave behind? Which quirks, affinities, and inclinations accompany us – quietly, persistently, unceasingly? And what new paths open up when we rediscover them again and again – between form and surface, between material and colour, between what we know and what we are meeting entirely anew?

Isabella Engelhardt