In a text describing the methodologies and conceptual concerns that comprise her “topographic” approach to documentary photography, Elisabeth Neudörfl has written that “a fundamental strategy of photography is exclusion.” With its high-contrast black-and-white images of housing blocks and the neglected green areas and dead spaces that border them, the artist’s recent series “Habitat,” 2010, documents—from varying distances and angles—those elements that make up an unidentified residential area, while intentionally denying a representational cohesion or narrative logic. The immediate

Let’s not beat around the bush: Stefan Müller’s “Salon der Daheim-gebliebenen” (Salon for the Ones Who Stayed Home) was a straight-up painting show. And as so often happens when painting starts to get interesting, it was treated here as “material”—both literally, with respect to the “material” of canvas and its preparation, and figuratively, as a self-reflexive “theme,” a set of various basic elements that can be shuffled and interwoven in many different ways.

The process of painting, Müller reminds us, begins already with the various textures of the canvases and materials as well as the