SVEN DRÜHL
F.N.J. – K.S.T.

KÖNIG GALERIE | NAVE
ALEXANDRINENSTRASSE 118–121, 10969 BERLIN

14 NOVEMBER – 19 DECEMBER 2025

KÖNIG GALERIE presents works by Berlin-based artist Sven Drühl, in collaboration with Hans Erni Museum Lucerne and Museum Wiesbaden. For over two decades, the artist has explored conceptual landscape art. The exhibition F.N.J. – K.S.T.—Drühl’s second with the gallery—features around 25 works, some on a large scale, primarily from 2018–2025, spanning three series: silicone paintings, lacquer paintings, and sculptures from the Dark series. Drühl studied art and mathematics in the 1990s, during the height of postmodern debates in the art world—a discourse that forms the foundation of his conceptual painting.

With his distinctive visual language, Drühl questions how we perceive and reproduce the idea of nature. His landscapes—meticulously crafted yet openly artificial—remind us that our images of nature are increasingly shaped by screens, algorithms, and cultural memory rather than direct experience. In an age marked by ecological vulnerability and climate change, his paintings and sculptures offer quiet reflections on the landscapes we inherit, the ones we consume digitally, and those we might be losing. A common thread across Drühl’s work is the absence of narrative. His landscapes feel cool and distant. People never appear, yet their absence draws attention back to them. Drühl works in series, revisiting individual motifs over time—altering sections, shifting colors, or translating them into other media, including neon-lightworks.

Drühl’s practice is built upon reinterpretation: he samples historical artworks, digital renderings, and fragments of mathematical models to construct landscapes that feel familiar but resist exact location. Just as a DJ layers sounds from different eras, Drühl remixes forms and ideas. His lacquer series features hyper-real mountain ranges, volcanoes and seascapes. Painted from computer-generated vector graphics, these hyper-realistic works break from traditional plein air painting while evoking the same awe and longing as a distant mountain range.

In contrast, the silicone series draws on the art-historical tradition of landscape painting. Drühl takes inspiration from artists ranging from the 19th century to today, translating their nature-based visions into distinctive silicone outlines in his unmistakable style. These works speak of the gap between nature as an ideal and nature as a mediated construct—filtered through culture, memory, and now the data streams of our screens. 

The paintings are complemented by new sculptures of mountain ranges. The Dark series is based on real mountains created using geodata. Drühl manipulates the Z-axis so that the mountains resemble those from science fiction and fantasy worlds, while still retaining a real foundation. Their surfaces are coated in thick black oil paint, linking them to Drühl’s black painting series. He understands his sculptures as an extension of painting into space.

As in both previous museum iterations, the exhibition also highlights Drühl's theoretical work. The artist holds a doctorate in art history and has made a name for himself as guest editor of 13 volumes of Kunstforum International and as author of numerous art history articles. For the first time, Drühl is also presented as a collector: his works are complemented by a selection of about 20 paintings from his carefully curated 19th-century collection, featuring artists from Eugen Bracht and Janus La Cour to Carl Spitzweg. This contrasting presentation of works from 1855 to 2025 forms a bridge between the 19th century and the present day.

Sven Drühl’s landscapes are not mere depictions of the natural world; they are meditations on how we remember, imagine, and reproduce it. His work weaves together the romantic and the digital, the sublime and the synthetic, inviting viewers to reconsider what nature means in a time of rapid technological change and environmental awareness. The artist opens a space for contemplation—where beauty, memory, and the trace of the human hand meet the infinite possibilities of the artificial.

Stations:

– Fascination 19th Century, Artist – Collector – Theorist, Hans Erni Museum, Lucerne, Switzerland, 21 November 2024 – 30 March 30 2025

– Fascination 19th Century, Artist – Collector – Theorist, Museum Wiesbaden, 9 May 2025 – 28 September 2025

– F.N.J. – K.S.T., KÖNIG GALERIE, Berlin, 14 November – 19 December 2025