Konrad Hanke
Fun without Suspicion
Exhibition PDF with List of Works, exhibition views and a text by Rosa Windt.
Duration until 9.5.2026
One image shows the edge of a forest rendered in a digital collage as a dark, slightly blurred contour against a uniformly magenta background. The frame recalls weathered wood with cracks and irregular edges, yet is in fact a cast made of epoxy resin, finished in matte grey.
Exhibition view
Konrad Hanke‘s exhibition Fun without Suspicion at Galerie Kai Erdmann operates within a tension between visible form and diffuse content. What initially appears to be familiar elements of a built environment repeatedly reveals itself as a deliberately constructed arrangement of repetition and reduction. The objects on view — among them fence slats, frame strips, and manhole covers — are based on a small number of distinct forms that, in their serial arrangement, generate a structured yet indeterminate space. Their surfaces, like that of the wooden frame, are uniformly finished in matte grey, recalling the neutral rendering of objects in 3D software, where form becomes visible before materiality. The digital collages show details from historical depictions of Utopia taken from Thomas More‘s book of the same name, published in 1516. Two of the maps Hanke uses refer to different visualisations of Utopia, pointing to the attempt to translate a metaphorical ideal social order into a concrete, site-specific form. The uniform magenta background of all the images derives from a logic of digital image production. In 3D software, this colour marks missing or unassigned textures, appearing wherever information cannot be loaded. In these works, that condition is made visible by withholding any unambiguous reading.
Exhibition view
A further recurring element is the lettering „Mellow Fields“. It appears both on a large-format print and on the cast manhole covers, borrowed from an advertising poster that appears in the background of Terry Gilliam‘s 1985 film Brazil, promoting a resort with the slogan „Luxury without Fear – Fun without Suspicion – Relax in a Panic-free Atmosphere.“ In the exhibition, this slogan becomes at once the title of the show and the name of an imaginary place. In conjunction with the depictions of Utopia, the promise shifts from an ideal vision of society toward an image of an unattainable condition. Fence, billboard, and manhole cover can be read as elements of this place, forming a fictitious urban space assembled from repeated forms and stock components. The construction fence without any visible construction site, the empty billboard, and the re-formed manhole covers also point to absences and to promises that were made but never kept. The objects are hollow, consisting essentially of their surfaces. In this reduction, parallels to digital models become apparent, where volume is produced primarily through visual means. Unfulfilled social promises enter as an implicit reference. The works thus move between physical cast and digital representation, examining how form, material, and image shift in relation to one another — and in doing so, lose their certainty.
Rosa Windt
Ærø 2026
Exhibition view
Galerie Berlin
Schweidnitzer Str 17
10709 Berlin
Opening hours:
Wed – Sat: 12 – 6 pm