Stranger Than Paradise

15. March 2026 - 7. June 2026

Ausschnitt der Bildcollage, die als Teppich bei der OLMA 2025 das Zentrum der Sonderschau des open art museum, St.Gallen bildete und nun als Titelmotiv der Ausstellung "Stranger Than Paradise" dient.

The carpet is rolled out a second time: At the center of Stranger Than Paradise is the monumental picture collage from the Olma 2025 special exhibition. In the museum, the carpet appears in a new context between paradisiacal harmony and broken idyll.

The motifs of the carpet collage come from the museum collection and can be seen in their original form in the exhibition. They are complemented by other works that take up the theme of “paradise” in a variety of ways: transfigured nature, idealizations of rural life, images of longing, but also irritations and ruptures. When viewed together, the seemingly familiar is cracked; harmony tips over into the absurd, the idyll becomes fragile. The result is not a uniform image of paradise, but a polyphonic collage – like the carpet itself.

The title Stranger Than Paradise refers to this ambivalence: paradise appears as a cultural motif and as a projection surface for individual pictorial worlds – as a place of longing, a place of retreat and a stage for exuberant fantasy, but at the same time also as a fragile fiction. In Naïve Art and Art Brut, paradise is a recurring motif, also as a place of longing for inner refuge.

The exhibition questions the idea of paradise as a harmonious natural idyll, an ideal couple or a heavenly place. It shows: Paradise is a fragile fiction. On display are works by Pietro Angelozzi, Anny Boxler, Aloïse Corbaz, Emil Graf, Hans Krüsi and Konrad Zülle, among others.

In the cabinet, textile researcher Thessy Schoenholzer Nichols presents miniature textile gardens. Magnificently designed, they glitter and sparkle in the light. Their shadows make the gardens grow and fill the room. Here you can lose yourself in the illusion of a paradise. The Hortus conclusus is a protected place of purity and beauty. In today’s understanding of a mindfulness garden, it serves as a retreat in contemplative silence.

Tickets

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Hortus conclusus

Hortus conclusus is the Latin term for “closed garden”, which was often used in art and literature from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance as a symbolic term for the purity and protection of the Virgin Mary. Garden culture is ancient; people have been cultivating plants as food and medicine since time immemorial. In ancient Persia, the enclosed garden, i.e. the garden within a wall, was a highly valued art form that required a great deal of care and attention. These oases were also an important form of courtly and monastic life in the Middle Ages. They were secluded gardens where you could stroll, observe and relax. Colors, shapes, scents, sounds and touch play an important role in these gardens, which appeal to all the senses. Magnificent flowers, perfect fruits and healing herbs grow here, all under the influence of clean, clear water. A paradise in the smallest of spaces.

Biography

Thessy Schoenholzer Nichols was born in Basel. In 1976 she moved to New York and worked at the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of the City of New York and other American museums. Since 1984 she has worked in Italy as a curator, conservator and exhibition designer at the Galleria del Costume, Palazzo Pitti (Florence), Palazzo Braschi (Rome), and the Museo della Moda (Gorizia), as well as in other museums. She has also taught design and textile history at the universities of Florence, Trieste and Rimini.

Her research focuses on medieval and Renaissance burial dresses, including those of Eleonora of Toledo, the Malatesta and Della Rovere families, Osanna Andreasi, Aragonese burial dresses from Naples, as well as 17th to 19th century burial finds from the Marche and Emilia Romagna. Thessy Schoenholzer Nichols also specializes in the history of lace and its production and was appointed to the St.Gallen Textile Museum in 2016 to work on the extraordinary lace collection there. In addition to her research activities, she is an haute couture embroiderer and creates works using the bobbin lace technique, which she has exhibited in Europe. She has lived in Basel since 2019 and has been working as a curator at Galerie Praxis, Basel, since 2022.

Interview

Sunday, March 15 from 11 a.m.

All are cordially invited, with aperitif.
The exhibition will open with a talk with textile researcher Thessy Schoenholzer Nichols, and the opportunity to rediscover gardens of paradise with her and walk the Olma carpet together.

Sunday, March 15 from 2 p.m.

Children’s vernissage – we make little miniature gardens atthe start of spring. With art educator Isabell Krähenmann.