Paco Koenig

Paco Koenig (b.1990) grew up between Berlin and a small island in the northern Aegean Sea. During his studies in Architecture at the Universität der Künste Berlin he started to pursue a diverse practice characterised by a commitment to painting and its formal and conceptual possibilities. He focuses on the materials, on how to paint, the surfaces, on the brushwork, the textures and all the subtle nuances of the structures that make a painting. Despite their material disparities, all works share the random or deliberate painterly traces that appear on their surface.

Koenig tries to reflect on the conceptual foundations of painting, producing abstract works using non-traditional materials like aluminium panels and figurative works on canvas based on photographs that challenge the reproduction and consumption of everyday imagery.

If Koenig had a conceptual constant, it would be the way he treats the the art-historical canon like a library of references to be called on: the legacy of gestural expressionism is evident in his abstract aluminium panels, nods to Primitivism and etchings are visible in his scrappy, drawing-like paintings. Koenig’s work is grounded in an investigation of abstract painting through a postmodern repurposing of signs and symbols. His work is in constant dialogue with what came before and what is happening around him. It's like sampling from history and culture, remixing it into his own unique sound. Gestures and figures are entangled with lines in the paintings to test the meaning and visual resonance of language. The etched lines are the foundation of the abstract works on top of which he employs an array of techniques including dragging, rolling, washing and stencilling – to control increasingly dynamic iterations from his established repertoire. This approach has become more complex over time, as the artist explores the effects of repetition, scale, rhythm, and different means of overpainting, to achieve the desired surface.

The paintings highlight the essential connection of the artist’s practice, in which he continues to engage with the boundaries of abstraction. The visual clutter, the raw energy of mark making, the way things get worn down and layered over time, the works seem to capture the energy and the entropy of the urban environment. It makes you wonder, how much of the city's pulse, its vibrant mess and subtle decay, flow into the works? The framing of his works as abstract paintings is designed to question what painting is, how it should be produced, and how an image can incorporate multiple layers of meaning that are revealed by the viewer's attention. Process and subject go hand in hand. Koenig has continued to experiment with painting as both medium and subject, consciously positioning it as a metaphor through which to probe the perceptions of image and the conventional boundaries of what constitutes art. The paintings based on photographs have sustained as an integral part of his painting practice, combining his inherently process based and conceptually rigorous approach. A continuation to explore the foundations of modern painting – the directness and immediacy of human mark making with the mediating effects of mechanical and photographic reproduction.

Text by Fabio Korbus

Koenig currently lives and works in Berlin, Germany.

Recent exhibitions include: NOT BE PAINTED, Galerie Kandlhofer (2025). Maybe It Was Magic at Miettinen Collection (2025), Video Center at Zenrale.Space (2024), Extraordinary Form Abstract and non-figurative art from the Miettinen Collection Part II (2024), Paintings at Architektur Galerie Berlin (2023), RAW at Gallery Vacancy Shanghai (2022), Do You Dream In Colour? at Galerie Lisa Kandlhofer (2021), Load Management at Spoiler (2020)