Andreas Eriksson in dialogue with Kim Chong Hak
Painting the path
Christinenstrasse 18–19
11 SEP 2026—6 MAR 2027
Opening – 10 SEP 2026, 6-10 pm
Andreas Eriksson, Lump, 2026, acrylic, egg-oil-tempera and oil on canvas, 235 x 252 cm. © Andreas Eriksson / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.
Courtesy the artist and neugerriemschneider, Berlin
painting the path, a dialogue between Kim Chong Hak and Andreas Eriksson, brings together new and recent work in painting by the two artists at neugerriemschneider. Featuring pictorial and sculptural pursuits uniquely attuned to the rhythms of the natural world, the exhibition traces the organic through methodologies born of divergent generational, political, geographic and cultural realities. Kim and Eriksson, who arrive at their isolated landscapes from similar sensibilities, each possess a keen eye for their environments’ subtleties, leading nuanced navigations of figuration and abstraction. With emotionally imbued approaches, they have become the de-facto chroniclers of the respective mountains that they call home: Eriksson’s Kinnekulle in Sweden, where he established his studio in 2002, and Kim’s Seoraksan in South Korea, where he has lived and worked since 1979. Each at pivotal points in their trajectories, Eriksson and Kim movingly capture the phenomena – spectacular and ordinary, overt and tacit – of their ever-changing surroundings. Here, watershed compositions stand in juxtaposition, acting in concert as revelatory lenses through which to view one another.
At the foundation of Eriksson’s practice stands the countryside that envelops his home and studio in rural Sweden, and his avid, ever-evolving exploration of it. Integral to this process is a heightened attention that allows details, scenarios, peculiarities and moments of chance to all become fodder for introspective exchanges. In new painted work, large-scale canvases mimic the grandiose proportions of his subjects, while smaller, intimate panels reflect a fascination for the world’s minutiae. Here, in conceptual distillations of natural phenomena, his practice sees new direction – one that is no longer constrained by the graphite guidelines that blueprint his previous work. A referential quality too remains absent from these latest images, giving way to a responsive approach in which paint informs itself, becomes sculptural and takes on the character of the artist’s tools. Eriksson, acutely studied in paints and their unique properties, conforms his methods to his materials’ behavior – the time it takes to dry, how it adheres to its surface, its susceptibility to external forces. The artist’s signature fields of color give way to an unburdened handling of medium, eliding precedent, while his increasing use of synthetic pigments continues this development: Moved across the canvas, they emerge from gentle organic earth tones into striking palettes. painting the path also features Eriksson’s A Second Time (2003 – 2007), and selections of his Molehill (2009 – ongoing) and Content is a Glimpse (2008 – ongoing) sculptures – cast-bronze impressions that accompany his painted work in capturing nature’s fleeting moments.
Kim Chong Hak, Landscape, 2019, acrylic on canvas, 8 parts, overall: 290 x 1800 cm. © Kim Chong Hak. Courtesy the artist and neugerriemschneider, Berlin
Over the past six decades, Kim has established himself as one of South Korea’s most esteemed painters, creating works that pay tribute to and revere holistic experiences of seasons as they pass and recur, shaped by time and recorded on canvas. A deeply pensive, historically charged approach takes on an exuberant edge as Kim’s considerations of nature’s splendor meet their physical representations – often with energetic coloration or in pared-down near-monochrome punctuated by focused linework. Born in the north of Japanese-occupied Korea in 1937, Kim came of age amid a reality in which land and landscape themselves were sites of discord. Upon his relocation to Seoraksan’s mountainside by way of Tokyo, Seoul and New York, these elemental scenes were cast as key subjects of the artist’s practice. Featuring in varying scopes and scales, this thematic engagement observes Kim break from and simultaneously acknowledge the past. His passion for collecting antiques and folk art, including the hand-carved ducks gifted at traditional Korean weddings, “kirogi,” two of which are on view here, is instrumental in this operation. Similarly vital are his early experiments with minimalism, abstraction, calligraphy, poetry and conceptualism, and his involvement with the elemental, material-forward mono-ha movement. Allowed to accrue to a figural mode, these influences give rise to a handling of paint as emotive as it is lyrical, ephemeral as it is grounded. His monumental Landscape (2019) unfolds across 18 meters, wrapping around a corner to profoundly panoramic effect. It encapsulates and exemplifies this ongoing pursuit, its edges thicketed and seemingly infinite in depth, while its foreground teems with untamed wildflowers in splendid bloom – its center tempting the promise of never-ending flora.
painting the path witnesses the lengthy walks that inspire many of Eriksson’s and Kim’s compositions. Embarked on without pre- determined motives, these solitary hikes are sessions as crucial to the work-creation process as the act of painting or sculpting itself. Along wooded trails, liberated from the impositions of society, the artists gather impressions left by nature. The resulting works are transcendental conceptions of their surroundings, rendered as unique systems of evaluation. Perspectives, brought together here, merge and diverge as the two artists cast one another in new, transformative light.
Kim Chong Hak, Untitled, 2017, acrylic on canvas, 53 x 65.1 cm. © Kim Chong Hak. Courtesy the artist and neugerriemschneider, Berlin
Opening to coincide with painting the path, Barbara Wien presents Horizontal Fold – a solo exhibition by Eriksson highlighting the integral nature of publishing to his practice. Paintings, photographs, silkscreen prints, cast-bronze sculptures and textiles accompanyan installation of Eriksson’s artist’s books (until December 24). Eriksson is also the subject of Soleil et Lune. Andreas Eriksson in dialogue with Ivan Aguéli at Institut suédois, Paris (October 20, 2026 – January 10, 2027). Kim is the subject of a presentation at Gangneung Museum of Art Sorol (July 22 – October 25, 2026) and the large-scale survey Kim Chong Hak, Painter of Seoraksan at the Phoenix Museum of Art (September 9, 2026 – February 21, 2027), following its premiere at the High Museum of Art. Andreas Eriksson (b. 1975) has been the subject of international solo exhibitions, including those at Murin-an, Kyoto (2024); OōEli, Hangzhou (2024); Lillehammer Art Museum, Lillehammer (2024); Lidköpings Konsthall and Vänermuseet, Lidköping (2023); Thielska Galleriet, Stockholm (2023); De 11 Lijnen, Oudenburg (2021); Skissernas Museum, Lund (2021); Nordiska Akvarellmuseet, Skärhamn (2020); Braunsfelder, Cologne (2019); Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm (2014); Centre PasquArt, Biel (2014); Reykjavík Art Museum, Reykjavík (2014); and mumok – Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna (2008). Eriksson has participated in the 30th Bienal de São Paulo (2012) and was selected to represent Sweden at the 54th Venice Biennale’s Nordic Pavilion (2011). Eriksson lives and works in Medelplana, Sweden.
Kim Chong Hak (b. 1937) has been the subject of international solo exhibitions, including Painter of Seoraksan, High Museum of Art, Atlanta (2025); Highlighting Contemporary Artist III, Busan Museum of Art, Busan (2020), Carte blanche à Kim Chong Hak, Musée national des Arts asiatiques – Guimet, Paris (2018); A Key to Creation, Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul (2015); and Retrospective, National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea, Gwacheon (2011). Kim has participated in the 13th and 12th Bienal de São Paulo (1975, 1973) and the 4th Biennale de Paris (1965). Kim lives and works in Seoul.
Billy Childish, Huddie Hamper, Scout Hamper
billy childish and the children of the sect
Linienstrasse 155
11 SEP—7 NOV 2026
Opening – 10 SEP 2026, 6-10 pm
Billy Childish, self with thunderbird, 2026, oil and charcoal on linen, 91.5 x 76 cm © Billy Childish / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Courtesy the artist and neugerriemschneider, Berlin
›billy childish and the children of the sect‹ at neugerriemschneider sees Billy Childish build upon his ongoing engagement with familial bonds and art-historical precedent, staging a three-person exhibition with his children, the painters and musicians Huddie and Scout Hamper, for the first time. A collection of recent work, including portraits by each artist of one another, painted in part in their shared studio, echo the context of their creation with striking intimacy and immediacy. This exchange, mutual and non-hierarchical, imbued with deep veneration and notable openness, transcends conceptions of lineage and influence within painterly traditions. Notions of artistic dynasties, conventional structures of mentorship and competitive tensions give way to distinct understandings established across lifetimes, here becoming the foundations for compositional and personal discovery, plotted along a shared on-canvas narrative.
Billy Childish, Huddie Hamper and Scout Hamper lead similarly intuitive practices, giving painted form to emotional assimilations of the worldly phenomena that surround them. For each, painting is a revelatory, spontaneous, fluid process in which works inform and complete themselves, resisting predetermination. This independent, candid spirit positions their work as vehicles for exchange, for reflection, for connection with their audiences and, in billy childish and the children of the sect, for triangulated conversation. Stylistically, this approach is one that allows contour and color to enter dialogue, at once lending perspective to and condensing canvases – the untreated linen of which frequently becomes a compositional element in and of itself. Within this operation, portrait- making becomes a central tool for the trio to mine the self and the other, the innermost qualities of their subjects emerging from each depiction. A distinct dynamic takes hold – one in which appropriation, development and the formation of unique visual and conceptual languages take place across artistic generations. Often calling upon the strategies of abstraction and deploying them to figurative ends, the artists expand their familial ties here into the universal and, in turn, invite their audience to take part in a similarly reflective act.
Billy Childish, walking in gods butie version, 2013, oil and charcoal on linen, 274.5 x 183 cm © Billy Childish / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.
Courtesy the artist and neugerriemschneider, Berlin. Photo: Rikard Osterlund
Lido, Berlin presents a concert by Billy Childish & CTMF on Friday, 11 SEP at 8pm to coincide with the exhibition.
The work of Billy Childish (b. 1959) has been the subject of international solo exhibitions, including those at Yi Space, Hangzhou (2025); He Art Museum, Foshan (2024); Villa Schöningen, Potsdam (2017); The Goss-Michael Foundation, Dallas (2017); Kunst- und Kulturstiftung Opelvillen Rüsselsheim, Rüsselsheim (2016); Neuer Aachener Kunstverein, Aachen (2014); No. 1 Smithery, The Historic Dockyard, Chatham (2012); Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (2010); and White Columns, New York (2010). Huddie Hamper (b. 1999) completed a Foundation degree at University for the Creative Arts, Rochester (2018) and studied painting at University College London’s Slade School of Fine Art, London (2018—2021) and at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf (since 2026). This is Scout Hamper’s (b. 2009) first exhibition. The artists live and work in Kent.
Cevdet Erek
Them and Us
Linienstrasse 155
11 SEP—7 NOV 2026
Opening – 10 SEP 2026, 6-10 pm
Cevdet Erek, Away Terrace (Us and Them), 2025, earth blocks, timber, 10-channel audio, size variable, duration variable, commissioned by Liverpool Biennial 2025. © Cevdet Erek.
Courtesy the artist and neugerriemschneider, Berlin. Photo: Stuart Whipps
Cevdet Erek’s ›them and us‹, his second solo exhibition at neugerriemschneider, presents recent stadium-like sculptural constructs as microcosms of societal dynamics, expanding his ongoing exploration of the sonic potential of architecture, and the architectural potential of sound. With the soccer arena as a paradigm of this negotiation, Erek’s large-scale sonic installation of compressed earth blocks and wall-mounted works visualize otherness, employing natural dyes and gold leaf to demarcate the ›away‹ corners of each—zones to which visiting crowds are relegated. Cleared of their fans, void of sporting symbols, banners, regalia or performed spectacle, the works become suspended in time, existing in equal measure as models of antiquity and of the modern world. Typifying and questioning in-group, proto-ancestral bonds, they come to function as distilled invocations of the unions, divisions and allegiances that pervade our present. A driving, primeval multichannel soundtrack suffuses the exhibition, its percussive, enrapturing rhythms heightening this inquiry and standing in for the pulses of a hypothetical, fervent public.
The exhibition’s centerpiece, Away Terrace (Us and Them) (2025), first realized for the 13th Liverpool Biennial in 2025, sees earth blocks rise in stacked tiers. For its new iteration in Berlin, the work’s rows of blocks, composed of repurposed soil dug from local construction sites, are elemental in presence, descending in terraces toward a dirt playfield. With the pitch’s game absent, associations and projections accrue unhindered – those of a colosseum, an arena or a hippodrome, an archeological find at once excavated out of the past and culled from the present – continuing Erek’s probe of historical narratives and built relics. At the installation’s corner, a tinted segment denotes the away team’s sanctioned spectator section, its bounds dictated at will by a speculative home team. This spuriously traced cluster, its full-scale equivalent often equipped with limited fittings and facilities, here exceeds its socio-athletic context to take on broader political and economic analogs. Exclusive and exclusionary, this separation sees parallel in Erek’s structure as a whole and how its properties dictate behavior: Unable to be entered, the work explicitly denies immersion. Remaining physically inaccessible, it renders a viewer as a third-person observer. The work’s soundtrack heightens this notion, emanating from loudspeakers embedded throughout the assembly’s grandstands. Each speaker emitting a distinct rhythmic layer, movement from one to the next is encouraged, inviting a visitor to partake in the same mobility denied to those invoked by the work’s away corner. Apprehended separately as one rounds Erek’s stadium at close range, the tracks meld to a unified arrangement when heard at distance, sharing a musical idiom, colliding with and pushing against one another, refracting off of their gallery surroundings to become entwined.
Surrounding Erek’s central installation are his Away Terrace works (2024 and 2025). Comprised of four wooden profiles joined at their corners – scaled reflections of his earth-block composition – the sculptures reference stadiums in Istanbul, depicting changes witnessed firsthand by the artist, and in Liverpool, their asymmetrical designs occupied in reality by rival clubs. Each assume a form that suggests a picture frame. Their depth and visual weight become allusions to the highly ornamented surrounds of centuries past, while their geometric structure becomes a pared-down interpretation of these embellishments. Applications of gold leaf span various lengths of the works, taking on new positions or disappearing entirely to indicate, like their analog’s dyed corner, similar away enclosures – marks of exclusion, separation and displacement.
Together, Erek’s engagements highlight his ongoing concern with how difference is represented, at once casting critical analysis upon this split and lending consideration to the ways in which shared affinity becomes connection. In this vein, them and us, its title brought together by a conjunction evoking a collaborative spirit, is an exhibition that prompts understandings of space as both shared and oppositional.
Cevdet Erek, Away Terrace (Anfield), 2025, wood, gold leaf, 80 x 88 x 25 cm
© Cevdet Erek. Courtesy the artist and neugerriemschneider, Berlin. Photo: Jens Ziehe, Berlin
Cevdet Erek, Away Terrace II, 2024, wood, gold leaf, 60 x 80 x 9 cm
© Cevdet Erek. Courtesy the artist and neugerriemschneider, Berlin. Photo: Jens Ziehe, Berlin
This fall, SculptureCenter in New York hosts Americas, a solo exhibition of new work by Erek (September 19 – December 28). Also in September, Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt opens Not All Travellers Walk Roads—Of Humanity as Practice (September 12 – December 6). Geographically and spatially translating last year’s 36th Bienal de São Paulo, the institution presents Erek’s landmark sound installation and graphic intervention Rampa rítmica (Rhythmic Ramp) (2025), commissioned for the original presentation.
The work of Cevdet Erek (b. 1974) has been the subject of international solo exhibitions at Secession, Vienna (2025); Hamburger Bahnhof—Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin (2019); Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago (2019); Museum of Contemporary Art, Antwerp (2018); Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City (2017); Pavilion of Turkey, 57th Venice Biennale, Venice (2017); Spike Island Artspace, Bristol (2014); and Kunsthalle Basel, Basel (2012). He has also taken part in the 36th Bienal de São Paulo, São Paulo (2025); the 13th Liverpool Biennial, Liverpool (2025); Manifesta 14, Pristina (2022); the 7th Singapore Biennale, Singapore (2022); the 7th Ruhrtriennale, Bochum (2019); the 11th Shanghai Biennale, Shanghai (2016); the 20th Biennale of Sydney, Sydney (2016); the 14th Istanbul Biennial, Istanbul (2015); the 5th Marrakech Biennale, Marrakesh (2014); Sharjah Biennial 11, Sharjah (2013); the 7th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Brisbane (2012); and dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel (2012). Erek lives and works in Istanbul.
