Glücksbringer - Idas Room Berlin 

A duo show with Gabriel Hafner 

“A lucky charm is an individual object that is said to bring good fortune” says Google. But luck, like meaning, is rarely so simple. It attaches itself to things, to objects, symbols, or materials that we assign power to. In GLÜCKSBRINGER, both artists Tilly Joos and Gabriel Hafner play with form and symbolism and how we engage with both the mythic and the manufactured.

Joos draws from symbols, myths, and motifs taken from cultures and religions across time. Her paintings are vivid, flat, and deliberate, leaning toward a pop-art sensibility, her subjects however, often are drawn from an older but equally universal language. Eyes, spirals, keys and ladders - even the sacred heart, populates her canvases, suggesting vision, wisdom, spiritual connection, and the urge to transform. These are symbols that once belonged to temples, tapestries, and talismans here, become personal, means of connecting inner experience to something material, something transmitted. They act as communicative objects, carrying a spirit from one person to another and in that way leaving space for individual sensation.

Alongside the historical symbolism are elements taken directly from the nature: crabs, snakes, corals, volcanoes, each carrying their own meaning. They speak to instinct, to growth and to the cycles of rupture and renewal. The snake, a recurring figure in Joos’ work, slithers between myth and earthliness. In her recent diptychs, she uses the traditional religious format to express the connections within her symbolic world. Each half is in conversation with the other, each side carries it’s separate idea yet suddenly they become intertwined.

In dialogue with Joos’ paintings are Gabriel Hafner’s industrially inspired textiles. Created in collaboration with Andrea Bratta, his carpets take their inspiration from the steel road plates commonly found on construction sites. These are heavy, utilitarian objects, marked by rounded cut-outs used for lifting. Hafner retains these formal features but shifts the material and context entirely: from rusty metal to soft textile, from dusty street to cozy interior.

Hafner’s carpets are not merely functional objects. They suggest the unseen: the movement of labor, the repetition of patterns, the presence of infrastructure beneath our feet. In transposing these forms as rugs, Hafner lifts industrial weight off the street and drops it gently into the domestic realm. Elsewhere a tool of industry, here the form becomes playful—something to be touched, walked on and lived with.

Joos takes the symbolic, Hafner takes the mundane and through art they both transform their source material into objects of individual experience. Their works don’t demand understanding; they invite projection. A snake, a spiral, a hole in a steel plate—these forms gain meaning through attention, through use, through the stories we assign to them. GLÜCKSBRINGER doesn’t promise good fortune, but it does suggest that luck, like meaning, is something we can shape for ourselves.