Hhh - Ahhh

Stiller Freund der vielen Fernen, fühle,

wie dein Atem noch den Raum vermehrt.“

— Rainer Maria Rilke, Die Sonette an Orpheus, Zweiter Teil, XXIX (1923)

MEP is pleased to present Hhh – Ahhh, a new solo exhibition by Tobias Gutmann. The exhibition has its roots in the artist’s own intensive breathwork practice — an encounter with how much the body holds, and how profoundly its state can shift when breathing changes. What began as a personal experience of returning to something quietly lost became the ground from which these drawings grew.

Across cultures and traditions, breath has often been understood as more than a bodily function — as something that also carries energy, movement, memory, and spirit. Hhh – Ahhh grows out of this wider understanding, while remaining deeply physical and immediate. These drawings do not illustrate breath. They emerge from it. The hand moves with inhalation and exhalation, with pause, contraction, suspension, and release. What appears on paper is a trace of bodily experience — not only calm, but also tension, interruption, and the effort of coming back.

At the heart of the exhibition lies the tension between breath and breathlessness. Shallow breathing is not treated here as neutral, but as something shaped by pressure, stress, and forms of holding that settle into the body over time. In this way, Hhh – Ahhh reflects not only an inward, meditative process, but also a wider condition of contemporary life — one marked by speed, overload, and increasing disconnection from the body.

Alongside a large-scale central work, the exhibition brings together framed drawings and a series of smaller works — each a trace of bodily presence that asks something quiet of the viewer. Breath, after all, is not only something to look at.

Check out our exhibition catalogue