BERLIN.- Pace announced participation in Suite Berlin, a new independent exhibition project welcoming international artists and their galleries to the German capital. The inaugural edition will be launched in partnership with Berlin Art Week, running from September 11 to 15, during which Pace will present eight new works by Qiu Xiaofei.
Conceived with the aim of introducing international artists and their galleries to the city’s art scene, Suite Berlin will stage an exhibition of works by four artists, accompanied by a reception programme, and artist and curator talks. Works by Qiu Xiaofei, presented by Pace, will share the space alongside Valie Export (Thaddaeus Ropac), Sonia Gomes (Mendes Wood DM), and Zohra Opoku (Mariane Ibrahim).
Each artist in the project will be welcomed to the city by a local curator, artist, or critic. Sebastian Baden, director of Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, will introduce Qiu Xiaofei to Berlin. Baden, who served as curator for contemporary art, sculpture, and new media at the Kunsthalle Mannheim from 2016 to 2022, also taught art history and media theory at the Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung Karlsruhe from 2010 to 2016. His curatorial work is deeply informed by his extensive experience as an art historian, educator, and artist.
For Suite Berlin, Qiu will present eight new enigmatic prints. Created as his father entered the last months of his life, and as his son took his first steps in this world, the works provide a space for meditating on the fluidity between life and death, birth and decay. Spontaneously executed as watercolours during hospital commutes to visit his father, then digitised and re-worked during long distance post-pandemic travels, the works contain remnants of his father's aging, the imagery of a newborn child, and the fleeting glimpses of forests, gardens, and decaying cities from his journeys. Dreamlike, biomorphic, and surreal, their improvisatory appearance conceals the years that Qiu spent living and working with these images. Therefore, Qiu’s works do not record any singular moment, but rather calibrate a host of disparate moments, bearing witness to the cyclical nature of life and death.
Qiu Xiaofei (b. 1977, Harbin, China) has worked with diverse media—including oil and acrylic paint, watercolor, sculpture, and installation—in an oeuvre originating in the layered and subjective experiences of personal memory. These recollections emerged in representational paintings and painted objects based on photographs and other visual sources from Qiu’s history, communicating an introspective desire to translate memory into tangible images. Developing from his preoccupation with memory, Qiu began exploring more collective realms of thought and introduced abstraction into his work, initiating a creative dialogue and exchange between artist and material. His expressive marks interpret the fluidity of time and space, as well as his psychological states during the creative process. Allowing his subconscious to drive his work, Qiu investigates the profound spaces of consciousness and the dimension between abstraction and reality.
