Suite Berlin

Pace is pleased to announce 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. 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 The 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.

Based in Beijing, Qiu Xiaofei works across painting, drawing, sculpture, and installation to evoke dreamlike states of memory and awaken the potentials of perception that are hidden in the depths of the mind. His current multi-disciplinary work combines drawings with sculptures that act as a chronological recorder of the artists’ history. As he explores various parts of his memory or “thought diversions,” as Qiu calls them, they allow him to delve deeper into his “procedural, subconscious and personal experiences.”

Suite Berlin is supported by UBS and part of the official Guest Program of Berlin Art Week.
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