Ralf Kerbach
Landscapes. Childhood paths
12 September – 25 October 2025, Opening: 11 September, 6-9 p.m.

In the exhibition “Landscapes. Childhood Paths”, Galerie Poll is showing new paintings by Ralf Kerbach, created between 2023 and 2025 in the Saxon countryside of his youth. In 1982, Kerbach was forced to leave this familiar place behind when he emigrated from East Germany. It was only as an exile in West Berlin, surrounded by the Wall, that he came to realize just how deeply the centuries-old cultural landscape near his hometown of Dresden had left its mark on him.

In 2020, Ralf Kerbach moved back to this region, shaped by vineyards, ponds, and farmland. For the past five years, he has been living with artist Heidrun Rueda near Meissen, in the hills above the Elbe. It was there that he felt the desire to paint his surroundings and unique light of the Elbe region in open air. With these works, he aims to reveal the essence of the Saxon landscape.

Tree, stone, cloud, hill, river, house, road, wall – transforming his everyday perceptions of the environment in which he lives into painting posed a challenge. He seeks to translate what he sees directly into surface – not to represent it, but to condense his seeing into a visual sign, guided by the image’s own internal logic.

Direct experience of the landscape and memories of his childhood surroundings come together in the creation of each image. The titles are brief and unadorned, usually without specific place names: “The Other Side” (2024), “Houses by the River” (2024), “Landscape near Cossebaude” (2025), “Small Elbe Landscape” (2023), “Fields in Spring” (2024), or “Vineyard in Winter” (2024).

Those familiar with Kerbach’s earlier work will notice that his palette has grown lighter and more luminous. To realize his subjects, he uses simple visual references and builds his images from overlapping or adjacent planes. Where once he painted apocalyptic landscapes, he now creates impressionistic studies of nature.

At the heart of every composition is an engagement with his own perception – and so, with “Self with Old Hat” (2025) and “In the Perseid Stream” (2022), two self-portraits also feature in the exhibition. In “The Landscape Painter” (2025), a figure in a yellow hat stands before an easel under a stormy sky in an outdoor studio. With this painting, Ralf Kerbach gives a playful nod to art history – and to his current creative chapter.

Ralf Kerbach was born in Dresden in 1956, where he also studied from 1977 to 1979 with Prof. Gerhard Kettner at the Academy of Fine Arts (Hochschule für Bildende Künste), until being forced by the GDR regime to leave the university. In 1982, after waiting a year and a half, he was granted permission to emigrate and had just twenty-four hours to leave East Germany. On 27 September 1982, Ral Kerbach moved to West Berlin. In 1986/1987, he received a scholarship in Olevano and a year later he spent a longer period of time in Paris. Until 1990 he lived and worked in Valquières near Montpellier. In 1991 he travelled to João Pessoa in the state of Paraíba in Brazil as a fellow of the German-Brazilian Summer Academy. From 1992 to 2023, Ralf Kerbach taught as a professor of painting and graphic arts at the Academy of Fine Arts in Dresden. His works are held important private and public collections, including the Berlinische Galerie, the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, the Museum der bildenden Künste Leipzig, and the Hasso Plattner collection in Potsdam.