KÖNIG GALERIE, St. Agnes. The Render Plays Along

A pink sky hangs over tiered mountains, with a green plain in front, a tree at its centre and a red-leaved one at the right-hand edge. Every mountain flank, every branch, every fold of meadow is outlined separately, so the surface flickers. The wide canvas hangs alone on the end wall of a very tall hall at St. Agnes in Kreuzberg, and the two visitors standing in front of it give the room its scale. The wall reads not as empty but as calm. The hall is the first thing you notice, and here that is praise: it makes the paintings stronger.

The hall belongs to St. Agnes, the former church where KÖNIG GALERIE shows; Rebecca Brodskis is on view in the Vault of the same building. The walls are coated in roughly thrown, sand-coloured render that gives the light back dull and flat. A continuous band of light runs round a suspended ceiling of wooden slats fitted with spots. The floor is polished screed with a hatch set into it.

More paintings in the same manner hang along the side walls, large and small. In a big horizontal canvas a river loops through the picture under a yellow sky, between hills built up like contour lines, and the bends are so regular that it looks more like a running track than water. On the adjoining wall, a tree in yellow blossom stands against night blue beside a pale moon; elsewhere a column of cloud comes down as a bundle of rays. Nature here is not observed so much as assembled, out of bands, rings and outlines.

Between them hang interiors, and they are the best paintings in the room. In one, a ribbed blue vase of red flowers stands on a floor in a diamond pattern, two red fruits beside it, and behind it run the same looping bands as in the river painting, as if the landscape had come indoors as a pattern. In the other, a red curtain opens onto a window with trees; on a round blue table stand a vase of white flowers and an orange, and a second orange lies outside on the striped floor. Here the method meets resistance. The vase and the orange remain objects, while everything around them turns to pattern.

What holds the paintings together is not the subject but the method. Landscape and living room get the same treatment, both taken apart into lines and put back together, both without aerial perspective. The rough render plays along: it swallows reflections, the colours stand alone against a matt wall, and every format looks larger than it is. The objection lies in the same method. Because every line matters equally, the eye finds almost nowhere to rest in the large landscapes.

About the exhibition itself I can say nothing reliable. No title hung in the hall, there was no label beside the paintings, and who painted them has not yet been established. That will be added as soon as it is certain. Until then, this is a show you can recommend without being able to say whose it is.

KÖNIG GALERIE, St. Agnes, Alexandrinenstraße 118–121, Kreuzberg, Berlin.

Photographs: Florian Jäger, 12 September 2026.