The Gender of the Gift* /  Cosmetic

Andrea Huyoff
in collaboration with Yael Bulik, Melanie Slowik, Sandra Maren Schneider, Eugene O’Donald

Opening
Saturday, April 25, 2026, 6–10 pm
Showroom #1
Rosa Canina Collective, sound performance
Thursday, April 30, 2026, 5 pm
Showroom #2
Art Intelligence with Andrea Huyoff and Anna Herms
In the presence of an AI. Open discourse and the construction of feminist datasets
Saturday, May 2, 2026, 4 pm
Finissage
Friday, May 7, 2026, 6–8 pm
Exhibition
April 25 – May 7, 2026
Opening hours
Monday to Sunday, 1–7 pm and by appointment

The Sleeping Beauty Encyclopedia is a long-term artwork in the form of an encyclopedia. Conceived as an index of terms, it engages with socio-cultural questions and operates visually through digital collage.
In the exhibition, Huyoff translates the titular terms The Gender of the Gift and Cosmetic into a spatial installation of the Sleeping Beauty Encyclopedia. The keywords originate from a product the artist encountered by chance as a consumer: an Alice in Wonderland sleep mask by Catrice (Cosnova), priced at €4.99.

Essay_Beate Scheder (excerpt)

Little Alice, dozing quietly to herself. In the real world, not in the wonderland behind the looking glass. Her neatly parted blonde hair rests against the massive trunk of a tree. On the starched apron she wears over her sky-blue dress lies her kitten Dinah. Alice sleeps deeply and soundly, dreaming of talking flowers and a white rabbit with a pocket watch, of the Cheshire Cat and the ballet of playing cards. She is probably the last person who would need something like a sleep mask.
When one falls ill – and even more so when one learns that one has been ill for a long time without knowing it – when illness pushes itself to the center of everything that previously constituted one’s life, values begin to shift. Time, for instance, can stretch across waiting: for appointments, calls, consultations, rounds, medication effects – and across lying in bed or on sofas, where hours, days and weeks fuse into a viscous mass.
A sleep mask becomes one of those things that gain significance. It can become a shield: it blocks out, shuts off – the light, the outside, the world. It covers.
Andrea Huyoff found one at dm. She was searching for an object “that speaks to her.” The “Catrice Sleeping Mask by Disney Alice in Wonderland C01 It’s Only A Dream” is a “soft sleep mask in a delicate lavender-purple design for relaxed excursions into Wonderland,” RRP €4.99, part of a limited special collection by the sister brands Catrice and Essence from Bad Sulzbach. Not a random product, but one Huyoff wanted to get to the bottom of.

“Won’t you tell us all about it?”, the Hatter asks Alice during the mad tea party. And the March Hare insists: “Start at the beginning. And when you come to the end… stop.”

So, to the beginning: Andrea Huyoff’s artistic interest lies in colorful products, in the things available for purchase in the world – the glossy and the grimy of the commodity sphere. She asks about relations between art and mass production, as Walter Benjamin, Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol and representatives of New Materialism have done before her. Huyoff does so in her own way: research-based, intuitive, expansive, collaboratively.
(…)

Full Essay by Beate Scheder DE EN

*The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia, Marilyn Strathern, University of California Press, 1988.

In her work Loose Ends,Andrea Huyoff collected unfinished artworks.Through this,she tells the story of interrupted processes and questions the objectification of art and the commodity value of artistic products.