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Let’s embrace life’s misfortunes: death, failure, heartbreak, and absurd accidents - with bold color, cheeky charm, and a good dose of laughter. HAHAHA!

Join us for the opening of Shit Happens! on Friday, 11 July 2025, from 17:00 to 20:00
at Anggrek Agency, Turbinenstrasse 46, 8005 Zurich.

Both exhibiting artists, Janet Müller (*1975, German, based in Zurich) and Leonore Leitner (*1996, Austrian, based in Vienna), will be present.

Donwload the list of artwork here.

Leonore Leitner (b. 1996, Austrian, lives and works between Vienna and London) blends real-life references with pop-cultural elements for her work, often merging familiar iconography with motifs of transience. Her paintings capture the pulse of the present while playing with aesthetic tensions—between past and present, commerce and individuality, reality and pop.

In Leitner’s wry visual universe, mortality, anxiety and the absurd seep into the everyday, almost unnoticed – until they grip us. For Shit Happens!, Leitner presents deceptively simple paintings, each winking at pop-cultural and historical iconography even as they trace the inexorable passage of time and the comical futility of our attempts to master it.

A single purple noose hovers against a neutral field, its soft folds rendered with meticulous tactility. Its long, distorted shadow doubles the knot, suggesting how threats entwine themselves in our psyches well before we recognize their shape. Here, Leitner traps tension between impending collapse and the cool restraint of painterly detachment – a sly nod to how dread often lurks in the corners of our perception.
In the bar scene for instance, a sharply dressed skeleton sits at a scarred wooden table, cigarette smoldering, glass of whisky in hand. Over rows of faded bottles, Leitner stages a gallowshumor reflection on modern vice: we drink, we smoke, we negotiate pleasure and selfdestruction under the indifferent gaze of time (and death). The skeleton’s tailored suit – so of our era of branding and identity – illuminates the absurdity of trying to outdress or outspend the void.
Finally, a classical bust of David weeps long, cartoonish tears that unfurl, blending high art with lowbrow graphic flourish. Leitner remixes Renaissance reverence and contemporary doodle, collapsing centuries into a single, sardonic gesture: even greatness cries, and often in shapes we never expected.

Across these works, Leitner’s hand is equal parts painterly precision and popadvertising playfulness – an inheritance of her training between Vienna and London. She mines the Zeitgeist with a playful pinch of satire, allowing impermanence to creep in not as melodrama but as sly undercurrent. Shit Happens invites us to look again, to feel that frisson of recognition when the joke – our fragile, fleeting existence –finally lands.

Leitner studied at the School of Communication Arts in London and later completed a master’s degree in Communication Design at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. With a background in advertising, she brings a sharp visual sensibility to her artistic practice, blending classical techniques with contemporary narratives. Since beginning to exhibit her work in 2025, she has embraced the creative freedom that painting offers—an expressive counterpoint to her commercial design work. Her visual language is distinctly contemporary, often infused with satire and shaped by a keen sensitivity to the cultural moment.

By Frank Polednik, Jr.

Janet Mueller (born 1975, German, lives and works in Zurich) primarily works with acrylic on whatever medium she can find—paper, cardboard, canvas, and more. She deliberately channels her state of mind onto these surfaces, sometimes painting over entire works again, or even smashing them with a hammer—breaking, puncturing, and forcefully releasing the emotions she’s grappling with.

In Shit Happens!, Mueller scrawls phrases like “HAHAHA” into dense black fields, balancing manic humor with existential dread. Her figures—part ghost, part grotesque—hover between abstraction and psychological portraiture.

Der Tod spielt Klavier (The Death Plays Piano) reveals a skeletal blue form etched in frantic lines, as if Death is toying with her emotional instrument following the loss of her brother. Another work, Broken Heart, features a torn canvas, hammered down by the artist herself. The faded neon pink surface is violently disrupted, and the piece is available for acquisition together with the hammer—exposing both presence and absence in a single gesture.
Even Mueller’s smaller works, drawn in raw, childlike strokes, carry a disarming emotional weight—tender, unsettling, and unfiltered.

Mueller’s works are held in public and private collections, including those of the City of Zurich, the Canton of Zurich, the Swiss National Bank, and Swiss Post. Her visual language has also inspired other creatives, including Zürich-based fashion designer Yannik Zamboni, who drew from Mueller’s work for his collection featured on Germany’s Next Topmodel.

By Maria Richner.