Karl von Orb is a Berlin-based artist who studied philosophy and German literature at Goethe University Frankfurt. Trained at the Akademie für Malerei Berlin and in classical atelier practice with Sadie J. Valeri, he works with object-based constellations drawn from familiar functional and cultural systems.

Von Orb introduces subtle displacements into everyday objects and situations, producing quiet tensions between use, meaning, and material presence. What appears rational or operational begins to falter – functions remain legible but no longer align with their conditions. Humor emerges as a by-product of precise misalignment, while the work oscillates between familiarity and unease without resolving into spectacle.

During the residency, von Orb develops new propositions through sketches, renderings, and small-scale physical studies using found objects, cast or fabricated elements, and printed matter, allowing configurations to emerge in response to critical dialogue. The process remains deliberately open, testing how far recurring questions about coherence, displacement, and fragility can be extended.

His work invites visitors to notice the provisional nature of structures they had never questioned – the moment when the familiar loses its self-evidence. The takeaway is not a conclusion but a condition: the quiet recognition that stability, in objects as in systems, is always borrowed.