In his story “The Figure in the Carpet” (1896) Henry James depicts a young critic who, in search of the hidden key to a work by a writer he admires, not only fails to find it, but also loses all joy in the work’s detail. In titling his exhibition “Figures in a Carpet,” Lukas Duwenhögger seemed to be handing viewers (critics included) the first thread of the web of references he had spun here. Or would it be more accurate to say he dangled it just out of reach? Ultimately, the title can be taken as ironic, but also as an earnest warning against the desire to reduce everything to an underlying