Christian Achenbach. 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. Mountain flanks, branches and folds of meadow are each 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. One visitor stands in front of it and another, much nearer, walks along the left wall, and the two of them give the room its scale. With only one painting on it the wall looks calm, and it doesn't look empty. You see the hall first, and it makes the paintings look stronger.

The hall is the nave of St. Agnes, the former church, where KÖNIG GALERIE has been showing Christian Achenbach's "ECHOTROPIA" since 9 September. Rebecca Brodskis is on view in the Vault of the same building at the moment. 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 under a yellow sky between hills built up like contour lines. 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, and elsewhere a column of cloud comes down as a bundle of rays. Nature here is assembled from bands and outlines, and these paintings don't much care what a tree outside actually looks like.

Between them hang at least four interiors, and they are the best paintings in the room. The largest, an upright canvas on the left wall, has a window view, yellow framing and a diamond-patterned floor. Another, on the right wall, has a yellow curtain, mountains, a yellow vessel and a chequered floor. In the first of the two smaller ones on the left wall, 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, because the vase and the orange remain objects while everything around them turns to pattern.

The method is what holds the paintings together. Landscape and living room are both taken apart into lines and put back together, with no aerial perspective in either. The rough render plays along. It swallows reflections, so the colours stand alone against a matt wall, and every format looks larger than it is. The method has a catch, though. Because every line matters equally, the eye finds almost nowhere to rest in the large landscapes.

The show is worth a visit, and a good share of the credit goes to the room, with its render and its height. The large landscapes wear you out. The interiors hold up, because something survives in them that cannot be taken apart into lines, a vase and two oranges.

Christian Achenbach, "ECHOTROPIA", is at KÖNIG GALERIE, St. Agnes, Alexandrinenstraße 118 to 121, Kreuzberg, Berlin, until 8 November.

Photographs: Florian Jäger, 12 September 2026.