[English Translation}

An exhibition by the artist collective Troika at Max Goelitz Gallery in Berlin.

TAGESSPIEGEL 17 July, 2027 9:01am

With a brilliant presentation by the London-based trio, Max Goelitz Gallery bids farewell to its Berlin location. In the future, the gallery will focus on its original headquarters in Munich.

Slightly blurred and softly rendered, dark trees stand against a sky-blue background, while an orange-pink mountain peak rises behind a forest edge. At first glance, the two new landscape paintings by the artist collective Troika at Max Goelitz Gallery appear familiar and alluring. But the closer one approaches, the more the works reveal a vibrating effect of estrangement, created by a wave-like structure that overlays the motifs.

Even without explanation, the poetic title of the series immediately hints at its central idea: “To Find What You Are Not Looking For.” Finding something you were not searching for requires openness—and that very openness seems embedded in these shimmering images.

Suspended between the impression of landscape painting and machine-generated abstraction, the works occupy a kind of in-between space. It is within this tension between analog and digital perception, nature and technology, humanity and machines that Troika has worked across every artistic medium for more than twenty years.

Friends Since University

Founded in 2003 by Eva Rucki, Conny Freyer, and Sebastien Noel, the collective met while studying in London, where all three continue to live today. At the heart of their practice is the question of how technology transforms our perception and reshapes the relationship between humans, nature, and society. Their collaborative approach is grounded in scientific research, particularly in the fields of natural philosophy and the history of technology.

Troika is distinguished by its ability to make subjects such as artificial intelligence, algorithmic data, alternative life forms, and both virtual and physical systems of representation intellectually stimulating while remaining sensorially engaging. After exhibiting internationally, the group has also become firmly established in Germany, with solo exhibitions at the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt and the Langen Foundation in Neuss.

Thanks to the artists’ insightful discourse and the eloquent explanations of their gallerist, Max Goelitz, visitors are introduced to a new series of works for which Troika uses historical black-and-white glass slides of landscapes originally created for geological surveying and mineral exploration.

The works begin with a painting process developed by the artists using Gabor wavelets — mathematical functions employed in digital image analysis to detect visual patterns.

Nature Under Control

The historical photographs are analyzed algorithmically before being translated into vibrating fields of color and texture using stencils, spray guns, and acrylic paint applied with airbrush techniques.

The landscapes dissolve into overlapping waves, veils, and interference patterns, remaining recognizable while becoming increasingly indistinct. The series demonstrates how deeply images of nature are intertwined with surveying, control, and classification, while simultaneously exposing the limitations of technological image analysis. Perception, it suggests, is an active process of selecting, filtering, and reconstructing.

One of Troika’s central questions — “How, and whether, can any single entity, perspective, or discipline ever arrive at a complete picture of reality?” — also explains why the artists work collectively. Even the group’s name reflects this philosophy. Their collaborative practice and mutual dependence not only enable their large-scale, site-specific installations but also express a broader ecological and social awareness.

 

Cactus In The Snow

The second series, “Arrivals without Coordinates,” depicts a cactus standing in a barren snowy landscape, simultaneously evoking the atmosphere of Caspar David Friedrich and the realities of climate change.

These AI-generated images, transferred onto large-scale slides and hand-colored using historical techniques, present plants that have been removed from their geographical and ecological contexts and placed into impossible environments, seemingly stripped of any coordinates.

The series questions the relationship between photography, cartography, and spatial control, portraying nature as a dynamic system that resists fixed location and rigid classification.

‘Arrivals without Coordinates (Key Largo Cactus on the shores of Doggerland)’, 2026,
Photographic dye on transparency, acrylic, aluminium,
29.7 x 21 x 6.4 cm,
Photo: Marjorie Brunet Plaza

AI Speculations

Troika continues this inquiry in the sculptural series “Ghost Specimen.” Mounted on the wall, the ghostly form of a plant raises immediate questions, not least because it can only be viewed from the back. Based on a specimen from a historical herbarium, it has been transformed into a metal sculpture using artificial intelligence and 3D printing.

Drawing on botanical collections, Troika investigates systems of classification while exposing their inherent gaps. Because the original specimen’s reverse side was never documented, even AI can only speculate about what it might have looked like. The result is not a reconstruction but an algorithmically shaped form of memory, demonstrating how nature is recorded through scientific archives and technological processes while also being inevitably distorted.

A Farewell to Berlin

The idea of discovering something unexpected also applies to the elliptical light installation by James Turrell, which had already become one of the highlights of Berlin’s Gallery Weekend. Its placement as the introduction to Troika’s new works perfectly reflects the gallery’s program of bringing together established and emerging artistic positions. In this case, both generations of artists share a fascination with perception as an active, open-ended process.

One would gladly see more exhibitions of this caliber.

After four years, Max Goelitz is closing his Berlin gallery in order to concentrate on new premises at the gallery’s Munich headquarters.