JOHANNA DUMET
Studio Visit

"I believe that the fool nowadays is the artist. We just take the place of the silly person,
who made everybody dream for a minute." – Johanna Dumet

"I believe that the fool nowadays
is the artist." – Johanna Dumet

Tucked inside a building that bridges Gründerzeit elegance with industrial character, Johanna Dumet’s Berlin studio feels like a place suspended between past and present, intimacy and spectacle. Large windows bathe the space in soft natural light—perfect for painting—while sculptural French lamps hang from the high ceilings like quiet companions to her process. Across the floor lie scraps of cut canvas, remnants of her practice that later find new life in collages. Little traces of Dumet’s world—small toys, dried flowers, or fragments of luxury packaging—anchor the studio with her signature mixture of melancholy and play.

It is here that Dumet invites you to her world while preparing for her exhibition FOOL FOR A LIFETIME at KÖNIG GALERIE. Moving from table to canvas, she unfolds her working process: showing the hand-painted tarot cards, carefully removing the crown from L'IMPERATRICE, or stitching fragments onto a new surface. Watching her work, one realizes what she means when she says her paintings are never quite finished until they are in the gallery. Each gesture—whether an incision, a collage, or a sewn thread—extends the life of the piece, opening it to chance.

Play, Dumet explains, has always been her essence in life. Drawing inspiration from childhood memories in rural France, and particularly from moments of watching her grandmother quietly read tarot cards, she approaches play as a kind of spiritual practice. “We just don’t play enough,” she explains. “Because it puts you in a much better space.” In her studio, play becomes a way of reordering hierarchies, of folding memory and fantasy into one another, of turning fragments into something whole.

The works on view at FOOL FOR A LIFETIME—22 large-scale tarot-inspired paintings and monumental card sculptures—carry these ideas into the raw, architectural space of St. Agnes. But here in the studio, among the light, the scraps, and the keepsakes, viewers glimpse the fragile beginnings of that world. It is a place where Dumet transforms everyday objects into talismans, and where folly itself—true to her title—becomes a lifelong wisdom.