TUE GREENFORT
WUNDERKAMMER
KÖNIG GALERIE
ALEXANDRINENSTRASSE 118–121, 10969 BERLIN
5 JUNE – 12 JULY 2026
OPENING
4 JUNE 2026 | 6 – 8 PM
KÖNIG GALERIE presents WUNDERKAMMER, an exhibition of new and existing works by Danish artist Tue Greenfort in the Chapel of St. Agnes. It is the artist’s ninth solo exhibition at the gallery.
Tue Greenfort’s work explores the ways in which nature and the environment are perceived, categorized, and hierarchized by humans. Rather than merely deconstructing the anthropocentric view of nature, which often romanticizes it, he seeks to expand perspectives on flora, fauna, and ecology together with the viewers, raising new questions and awakening curiosity. At the same time, his work addresses possible new forms of coexistence between humans and nature.
The exhibition examines how Greenfort engages with these questions across different media and artistic forms, approaching a wide range of themes through artistic practice. Visitors enter a kind of "Wunderkammer" of his oeuvre, in which concepts for ongoing and future projects are also presented.
© Tue Greenfort
The hexagonal ceramic work BUTTERFLYBUSH BUDDLEJA DAVIDII II, for example, originates from a project Greenfort realized in 2021 for Rochester Square in London. He worked with invasive plant species and explored questions concerning the relationship between identity and place of origin—an issue made especially tangible in the capital of what was once a vast global empire.
Greenfort approaches his fields of inquiry in an entirely artistic manner, incorporating both artisanal and artistic traditions. The cyanotypes on display, produced in Seoul, employ a nearly 200-year-old technique related to photography. They pay homage to the English botanist Anna Atkins, who popularized the technique through her documentation of algae and ferns.
Algae are the subject of works such as the two suspended glass sculptures ULVA as well as the water-filter prints VENICE LAGOON. They are organisms that resist clear systematization and classification while possessing a wide range of characteristics. Among the oldest forms of life on Earth, algae have continuously adapted to highly diverse living conditions over millions of years. Greenfort explored this thematic complex, among other contexts, in an exhibition presented in 2022 at the Eres Stiftung in Munich which was subsequently shown in parallel with the Venice Biennale, where the lagoon constitutes a unique ecosystem and where the exhibited water-filter works were created. Greenfort also collaborated with glassblowers in Murano and discovered beaches speckled with remnants of colored glass, to which he paid tribute through the cast beach sculptures SACCA SAN MATTIA.
Alongside these beach casts, some of which were also created in the artist’s native Denmark, the rear wall of the Chapel features glass objects that freely interpret the moon jellyfish. This jellyfish is the best-known and most common species found in the North and Baltic Seas. In his choice of medium, Greenfort references another traditional technique: the naturalistic glass models of zoological and botanical subjects produced in Dresden by Leopold Blaschka (1822–1895) and his son Rudolf Blaschka (1857–1939) for, for example, the collection of Harvard Museum of Natural History.
Along the side walls of the Chapel hangs a series of drypoint prints entitled POACEAE (2022). Greenfort expanded the traditional printmaking technique—in which the motif is incised into a plate—by incorporating the motif itself, an ear of grain, directly into the printing process. "Poaceae" is the scientific term for a family of plants that includes many of the crops most essential to feeding the world’s population.
The work FUNGI DECOMPOSITION was first shown as part of the group show "Plastic World" at Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt. In it, Greenfort reflects on the wondrous organism of fungi and their widely discussed potential to break down plastic waste.