An Echo Chamber of the Imagination:
Journeying through CHRISTIAN ACHENBACH’s Landscapes

© Photo Mika Gentili

Though the painting conveys a sense of depth, one would look in vain for a vanishing point. These elements interlock and overlap. The result is something like the cosmos of a computer game—but also entirely different, for this work is equally about painting itself, about the interplay between fragile chalk lines and intense colour fields formed of oil paints. Geometric and natural forms flirt with one another while the surface is appropriated by three-dimensional bodies, creating a landscape across which the eye saunters, astonished. In Kreola (2024)—a landscape painting measuring over 5 metres in width and 3 metres high—a yellow frame transforms the scene depicted into a stage where theatre technicians might set the shallow mountain range into motion at any moment. Or does it perhaps make more sense to read this entire landscape as a partita, as per György Ligeti? His 1950s-era composition Artikulation transformed electronic music into an image and back again. Can we also understand the mountain range as waves in a visual representation of an electronic audio file? And if so—how would they sound?

© Photo Roman März

Ever since Wassily Kandinsky, synaesthesia has been a root of painterly abstraction, while the avantgarde and its joyous eclecticism has been the patron saint to such visual worlds. The bushes’ long and thin branches with leaf-like dots could have been lifted from one of Alexander Calder’s mobiles. A black-and-white pattern runs along the lower edge of the pictorial surface like designer flooring, offering a piece of Op Art as a foundation for the playful colours unfolding overhead. In contrast, Aspasio (2025) has no added floor— rather, trees grow directly out of a tangle of streams and pathways. The painting transforms the idea of trunk/branch/leaf into a celebration of intertwining ribbons of colour, letting the forms dissolve into fractal cascading lines. The horizon is so low that the sun’s circle shimmers from beneath the tree crowns. This is how an evening in Echotropia might look.

Achenbach has remarked that historically, painting has always been in dialogue with contrasts—light and dark, black and white, cool and warm colours. But his interest lies in other contrasts: between geometric and organic shapes, and between Op Art and Abstract Expressionism. These two movements existed in parallel during the 1970s; in Achenbach’s work, he crashes them together to see what ensues. For some years now, his painting has focused on landscapes: experimental, even psychedelic, sometimes collaged, then dazzling, even garish in their colour choices. A long tradition backdrops Achenbach’s work.

© Photo Roman März

The story of modern Western landscape painting is an old one, arising during the Renaissance, in tandem with the rise of a central perspective that served to structure and organise not only interior spaces but entire outdoor scenes. These new landscape paintings assigned the viewer a new role. In depicting a landscape, the painters now also posited a modern, independent individual defining himself by his distance from nature. Suddenly, there was a subject standing in a landscape cleanly divided by a line dubbed the horizon, a central point on which everything converges. Landscapes once offered a stage set for the next Bible story, but with this, they became subjects unto themselves. Nature turned into a counterpoint constructed in relation to man—who himself acts as a counterpoint of nature. Conquering nature becomes crucial in order to map it and define its resources. Even as landscape painting emerged as a genre and a subject, the first land registers were being compiled and estates surveyed. Yet, simultaneously, people exulted in the unfathomable sublime of high mountains and wild seas.

In contrast to German Expressionism, Renaissance landscapes weren’t suffused with radiant purples, pinks, blues, and oranges. But even then, the aim was not merely a realistic depiction. When perceived, nature edged into an ideal, as the gaze was guided by a tradition. In the Renaissance, the presence of hills, mountains, forests, and the sea made a world landscape (Weltenlandschaft) complete. Even today, these four main elements cheer the soul, and a profound sense of contentment descends over the tourist tooling around in a paddle boat off the southern coast of Italy with exactly these features spread out before him.

© Photo KÖNIG GALERIE

That said, Chinese artists had already begun to paint masterful landscapes some five hundred years prior—admittedly without a central perspective, but with an openness and indefiniteness that left space for the imagination amid a work’s elements. In Chinese, such paintings are called ‘shan-shui-hua’ (literally, mountain water). The term ‘landscape’ suggests a totality, whereas mountains and water are distinct features to which one might enjoy individuated relationships. The viewer of such a painting could be similarly fluid— not insisting on his status as an individual (perhaps in an absence of cogito ergo sum) yet not noticing any kind of boundary between nature and humanity.

What is nature to us? Has the very fact of our seeing it as an entity separate from us led to the current catastrophe? This brings us back to Echotropia—and to Christian Achenbach, who asks exactly these questions playfully, never insisting on lightning bolts and thunder-clouds. He knows his masters from Asia, and he knows his Pieter Bruegel too. He’s wandered the magical, silent, charged landscapes of Giorgio de Chirico and the surreal scenes of Salvador Dalí. Achenbach’s landscapes are inner worlds just as psychedelic as a Jimi Hendrix song—but, with a shake of his head, the artist explains no drugs are involved, simply honest observations of nature. Over and over again, he’s drawn to this world of endless possible shapes, one which has fascinated so many artists before him. There’s nothing more multifaceted, he said. Maybe someone has grown up?

Christian Achenbach was born in Siegen in 1978. He came to Berlin in the 2000s, studying with Burkhard Held and Daniel Richter at the University of the Arts before finishing his MFA under Anselm Reyle. He spent nights behind a drum kit playing punk music in the city’s cellar clubs. The nights were long. Echotropia is more than just a place for art historical echoes. It’s also a space for the music that has anchored deep within, whose rhythm still lives in him today. As a drummer, Achenbach painted guys with tousled hair and guitars, or behind drums—amusing characters resembling comic book figures with their long arms. He painted the sound of his drums in varied, gestural explosions of colour. If these colours unexpectedly took the form of a flower bouquet, it was the ironic joke of a young man with little time for roses, tulips, or carnations—and a painting that veered from representational art into pure painting. Just as his band once cranked up the amp, so too does Achenbach crank up his painting now, celebrating colours and inviting an almost-slapstick exaggeration of gestural abstraction to burst out of a vase of flowers. From the very beginning, Achenbach’s paintings have revealed a pure delight in painting itself—a delight which art history joyfully embraces and which makes everything possible, as long as a good painting is the result. Incidentally, punk was merely the initial spark for Achenbach’s lifelong and intense engagement with music. Jazz, electronic music, hip hop, heavy metal, classical, contemporary music—Achenbach’s record collection today is as varied in genre as his collection of art books.

© Photo KÖNIG GALERIE

At some point, the figures disappeared from his paintings, replaced by an insouciant geometry—a distant relative of Cubism. Sometimes, the work evokes post-war stained- glass windows in German churches, surprisingly stylish in their adoption of modernist aesthetics. One of these paintings is titled Vibrations (2018). Synaesthetic vibrations permeate the entire work, and sometimes music even chimes in. For Terra Incognita (2023) at Mazzoli Gallery in Berlin, Achenbach transformed his paintings into a stop-motion video with a soundtrack created in collaboration with Christopher Marquez of the band collective Von Spar and musicians from Staatskapelle Berlin.

Shapes in Achenbach’s echo chambers are always rhythms too. They can spread and extend beyond a painting’s frame. The artist sometimes covers the exhibition walls with geometric patterns, fitting his paintings into a spatial expanse. He used a drawing of pre-Columbian ornaments by Josef Albers as a basis for a mural at König Gallery in Mexico City which formed part of his Paricutín exhibition (2025/26). This system of references is very much to his taste. He has also translated this geometry and interplay of colour and form into sculpture. Since the mid-2010s, the artist has been creating abstract structures from colourful painted steel. He later began incorporating transparent glass, lending the colours a further dimension

Which brings us back to colour. Achenbach doesn’t think much of strait-laced Western modernism. His colours vibrate and dance. It’s likely no coincidence that his art is so popular in India and South America—places where no-one sticks to subtle neutrals. The artist explains that at some point, he reached the end of abstraction. Yet he had no desire to return to the figure, which he found too narrative-driven and too direct. Thus, the landscape offered him a way forward. Nature’s diversity of shapes yielded a seemingly infinite reservoir to draw on—one he recreates more than depicts. At the same time, his abstracted landscapes beg the question landscape paintings have raised for centuries: Who are we, the viewers? Certainly, we’re not a self-assured, rational self that systematises the world. Rather, we’re composed of many individual parts, temporarily held together by frameworks we construct for ourselves, and driven by the effects of our synapses. But—and this is important to Achenbach—our selfhood exists in an analogue world. His painting is tactile, layering paint and offering a presence no printed reproduction can convey.

© Photo Roman März

A few weeks after my first visit to the studio, his massive painting had changed. Achenbach had added a dramatic ray of light in the sky. And the work had been named: Genesis. Yes, these landscapes definitely have a touch of the Enlightenment and resurrection about them. You can shake off a religious childhood—but sometimes it creeps back in through the rear door. By contrast, the pattern at the bottom of this painting is taken from the cover of a 1990s math-rock album. It’s all there, deftly blended and seasoned with a dash of humour. A reference to a utopian land is also tucked into the neologism ‘echotropia’. If utopia is what you’re seeking, you’ll have to set off, step into these pictures, and lose yourself in their luminous landscapes.