Eric Meier & Andrea Pichl

As part of Berlin Art Week 2025, we are very pleased to invite you to our exhibition Eric Meier & Andrea Pichl, featuring the two artists Eric Meier (b. 1989 East Berlin, GDR, lives in Berlin) and Andrea Pichl (b. 1964 Haldensleben, GDR, lives in Berlin). Eric Meier has been represented by Mountains since the gallery’s founding in 2019. In 2024/2025, Andrea Pichl became the first female East German artist to have a solo exhibition at Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin and is currently a guest artist at Mountains.

With this exhibition, Galerie Mountains has been shortlisted for the VBKI-Award Berlin Galleries.

With the duo exhibition of Andrea Pichl and Eric Meier, the gallery once again engages with the discourse around East German identity, particularly in the field of art. The exhibition Eric Meier & Andrea Pichl brings together two artistic positions that address the GDR, reunification, and the aftereffects of East German experience in very different ways. Between critical investigation and ironic disruption, Andrea Pichl and Eric Meier raise questions of visibility, value, promise – and disappointment.

Andrea Pichl presents her work "Wessen Morgen ist der Morgen? Wessen Welt ist die Welt?" (Whose tomorrow is tomorrow? Whose world is the world?), a quotation from the workers’ song by Bertolt Brecht and Ernst Busch, set to music by Hanns Eisler in the context of the Great Depression of 1929. The installation consists of printed construction tarpaulins mounted on fences – a form that evokes not only building sites, but also temporary barriers, ruptures, and transitions. Pichl’s sculptural and architectural works examine the codes and power structures of the built environment of the GDR. At the same time, they ask how history inscribes itself into space – and how such spaces are reinterpreted, overwritten, or newly claimed.

Eric Meier responds with the series "Enttäuschte Gesichter (Wir hätten uns mehr erwartet)" (Disappointed Faces (We had expected more)) – photographs of banana slices in which disappointed, ironic “Wessi” expressions appear. The banana, once a symbol of Western promise in the East, becomes a projection surface for post-reunification disillusionment. Meier's work plays with clichés, media narratives, and the question of how much seriousness, how much play, and how much self-doubt are permitted – or necessary – in the artistic engagement with East German themes.

In her accompanying essay, Undine Rietz writes: “The artistic positions of Eric Meier and Andrea Pichl make clear how history resonates in structures as well as in identities, and how selectively these traces are negotiated politically. The way German politics deals with the architectures of both dictatorships reveals a striking ambivalence: while Nazi buildings are embedded within elaborate cultures of remembrance, GDR buildings are often gutted, reshaped, or erased. In this process, the confrontation shifts from historical reality to symbolic-political staging – an attitude that could be described as curated amnesia. Meier and Pichl give this amnesia a form. Their works are not only testimonies to personal experience, but also counter-narratives to an official historiography that sells selective memory as national coherence. They demonstrate that the present, whether we like it or not, carries the weight of the past – not only as narrative, but as a built, lived, and ongoing reality.”