Galerie Poll Berlin
Exhibitions
Eric Keller – Hillside
4 September – 24 October 2026, Opening: 3rd September, 6-9 p.m.
In “Hillside”, Eric Keller presents new work from the past two years, focusing especially on the GDR’s houses of culture abandoned after 1989. Keller has long been interested in the assembly halls of these neglected buildings. Empty stages, dusty scenery, props and paper garlands, withered potted plants, chairs left behind, and the faded colours of the interiors all become objects for his paintings, portraying sites where a collective social life once took shape that now feel both uncanny and familiar, and where a vanished society lingers as a faint afterimage.
“In Keller’s work, depictions of decay become washed-out or torn, cloudy or trickling abstractions – masterful cabinet pieces that leave us wondering again and again whether we are actually looking at a wall or at a picture within a picture” (Sebastian Preuss).
For his fifth solo exhibition at Galerie Poll, Keller was able to continue his Houses of Culture project in 2025 with the support of a grant from the Stiftung Kunstfonds. Further paintings from the series will be presented in early 2027 in his first institutional solo exhibition, at the project space of the Städtische Galerie Dresden.
In addition to interiors, Keller turns his attention to unspectacular urban spaces such as waterside paths, sports fields and car parks, and railway crossings. Although most of the impressions Keller has incorporated into the visual cosmos of his paintings in recent years come from Saxony, since 2023 his work has also been shaped by landscapes encountered on trips to South Korea and the Canary Islands.
These spaces mostly remain deserted. But some compositions also feature young people in contemporary clothing. These paintings are based on drawn portrait studies of friends and acquaintances. Galerie Poll is also showing two of these large-format canvases, “Basin near Gunsan” and “Near Teguise”, both from 2026.
Keller constructs his compositions through large areas of colour, built up tone on tone from thin layers of oil glaze in various shades of grey, blue, violet, or ochre; in the landscapes, greens enter the palette as well. Layer upon layer, the process itself becomes a palimpsest: painted memory takes shape through superimposition rather than representation. The slight blur Keller casts over his motifs is not a nostalgic veil, but the very means by which a place is rendered present. Working on the painting, the artist returns in his imagination to scenes often glimpsed only fleetingly or in passing and reassembles them. Their exact location is sometimes revealed by the title, but often remains his secret.
Eric Keller (b. 1985 in Grimma) studied painting in Nuremberg, Dresden, and Leipzig, where he completed his degree in 2018 as a master student of Professor Annette Schröter at the Academy of Fine Arts (Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst). In 2025 he received a scholarship from the Stiftung Kunstfonds. Eric Keller lives and works in Dresden and Berlin. His works are held in numerous private and institutional collections, including the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, the Städtische Galerie Dresden, and the Collection of Contemporary Art of the Federal Republic of Germany in Bonn.