In Sweden’s Kinnekulle tablelands, a pine-scented studio; thousands of miles away, clinging to the slopes of South Korea’s Mount Seorak, an atelier immersed in silence. Having retreated from urban clamour, two artists from different generations and cultural milieus transform solitary mountain walks into the foundational spine of their painterly practice. On view at neugerriemschneider in Berlin through 6 March 2027, the exhibition painting the path unites Andreas Eriksson and Kim Chong Hak in a poetic dialogue attuned to the unseen rhythms of the natural world.
For Eriksson, painting begins long before brush touches canvas, originating in aimless strides across the Swedish countryside. The play of light filtering through canopies, the scent of damp loam, and chance sensory encounters shed any rigid underdrawing once translated into the studio. Relinquishing the paint to its own viscosity, subject to gravitational pull and the drying times of successive strata, the artist builds sculptural surfaces that oscillate between muted earth tones and defiant synthetic accents. Flanking the canvases, bronze casts from his Molehill series seal these fleeting, fragile disruptions of the terrain into enduring sculptural form.
Shaped by Korea’s turbulent modern history, the 1937-born Kim Chong Hak has lived at the foothills of Mount Seorak since 1979. Fusing Eastern mysticism, the calligraphic economy of the Mono-ha movement, and the tactile legacy of traditional Korean woodwork with an expressionistic chromatic vitality, Kim channels nature’s feral majesty directly onto the picture plane. Spanning 18 metres as it bends across the gallery walls, his monumental Landscape (2019) engulfs the viewer in an all-encompassing, densely layered sea of wildflowers, summoning the cyclical, timeless cadence of the seasons.
For both artists, treading the footpath transcends mere conceptual gestation, becoming indistinguishable from the act of painting itself. Emerging from two disparate topographies, this shared visual memory reimagines landscape not as scenery to be passively observed, but as an immediate threshold where the human spirit and the natural terrain meet on level ground.
