We Should've Danced More brings together new works by South African artist Anji Woodley and German artist Alfred Müller, developed during a residency at Alejandra Topete Gallery in December 2025. Though distinct in form and approach, both practices became deeply responsive to the particular atmosphere of Mexico City: its architecture, intensity, color, light, and subtle surrealism. The exhibition reflects a moment of artistic transformation, revealing how encounters with place can alter perception and expand the possibilities of a practice.
For Anji Woodley, art begins with questions that resist easy resolution. Her work explores consciousness, spirituality, nature, and the complex ways human beings coexist within visible and invisible systems of connection. Working across painting, sculpture, sound, and immersive installation, she approaches each medium as a different mode of inquiry—a means of moving deeper into an idea rather than arriving at a fixed conclusion.
Woodley's works often inhabit a space between the psychological and the spiritual. Portal-like forms recur throughout her practice, suggesting thresholds between inner and outer worlds, the seen and unseen, the individual and the collective. During the residency, she continued her ongoing experimentation with material transformation, manipulating canvas with clay to create a sculptural woven wall piece that merges textile and ceramic processes. The work investigates the visual language of brainwave activity and the shifting frequencies associated with different states of consciousness, translating intangible mental and emotional experiences into physical form.
Underlying this exploration is a personal history shaped by multiple cultures, faith traditions, music, and the layered contradictions of life in South Africa. Experiences of migration, motherhood, loss, and renewal have informed an artistic language attuned to transformation and resilience. Self-taught and materially adventurous, Woodley approaches her practice with equal measures of humility and intuition, allowing materials to exceed their expected boundaries in pursuit of new ways of knowing.
Alfred Müller's paintings similarly emerge from a period of transition. Created during his residency at Alejandra Topete Gallery, the works form part of an ongoing evolution within his practice. Having studied under Georg Baselitz, whose recent passing marks the close of a significant chapter in German painting, Müller continues to move beyond the monochromatic silver surfaces that defined earlier phases of his work toward increasingly vibrant, chromatic, and psychedelic compositions.
The residency became a catalyst within this transformation. Influenced by the architectural clarity of nearby Casa Barragán, as well as the unique luminosity and atmosphere of Mexico City and Yucatán, Müller developed a series of large-scale paintings that merge European painterly traditions with Mexican visual experience. Works such as Heliconia, Hombre Cayendo, and Poppy embody this encounter, unfolding through saturated color, shifting spatial relationships, and heightened sensory intensity.
A defining feature of Müller's paintings is their dual existence under changing light conditions. Activated by both daylight and ultraviolet illumination, the works undergo dramatic transformations, shifting from luminous abstraction into immersive black-light environments. The exhibition places these residency works in dialogue with selected earlier paintings, creating a conversation between different moments in the artist's development while highlighting the continuity of his search for new pictorial possibilities.
Together, the works in We Should've Danced More speak to the generative potential of movement between countries, cultures, identities, and states of perception. Rather than documenting a place, the exhibition reveals how place can become an active collaborator in artistic practice. Through material experimentation, psychological inquiry, and the transformative power of color and light, Woodley and Müller offer distinct yet complementary reflections on change, presence, and the ways we navigate an increasingly interconnected world.
On view
June 6th - July 25th, 2026
If you'd like to receive the preview, please email info@alejandratopetegallery.com
