International group exhibition in Greiz explores the landscapes between memory, perception, material and imagination
GREIZ, GERMANY — On 3 October 2026, the Museums in the Castle and Royal Seat Town of Greiz open Landscapes of the Soul, an international group exhibition bringing together fifteen artists whose work explores how inner experience takes visual form. The exhibition will be open to the public from 4 October through 22 November 2026 at the Museum in the Upper Castle and the Museum in the Lower Castle.
Taking the idea of landscape as a point of departure, the exhibition moves beyond landscape as a traditional genre. Instead, landscape becomes a way of thinking about the relationship between perception and memory, body and environment, material and imagination. Across painting, mixed media, conceptual work, photography, assemblage and experimental material practices, the artists approach the “soul landscape” as something shaped through color, surface, rhythm, gesture, matter and space.
The exhibition spans a broad range of visual languages. Geometric and symbol-charged acrylic painting appears alongside atmospheric oil landscapes, visionary mixed-media imagery, sensuous figuration, color-field abstraction, text-based conceptual work, photographic-painterly hybrids and object practices using reclaimed vinyl. Rather than presenting one fixed image of an inner world, these approaches reveal how emotional and perceptual experience can take radically different forms.
Some works seek order through circles, grids, recurring geometries and motifs associated with frequency, elemental systems, cosmic structures or the passage of time. Elsewhere, winter landscapes, dark valleys, luminous horizons, grottoes, castles, underwater worlds and elevated views of the earth remain recognizable while being transformed through atmosphere, scale and mood. These settings become spaces of distance, suspension, solitude and wonder rather than straightforward descriptions of nature.
Material itself also becomes a form of landscape. Raw canvas, charcoal, ink, pastel, acrylic and oil crayon preserve traces of touch and transformation; layered mixed-media surfaces build density; wool, ash, body imprints, poured acrylic and translucent glazes register process and erosion. Reclaimed vinyl records and record covers are cut, sawn, layered and reassembled, turning former carriers of sound into tactile image-objects in which rhythm, memory and ecological reuse become part of the work’s meaning.
Figurative works bring the body and face into focus as sites of sensuality, self-perception, identity, vulnerability and social existence. Other positions move toward reduction and conceptual structure: expansive color fields foreground chromatic emotion, handwritten language shifts from reading into rhythm and abstraction, and photographic imagery combines with painterly intervention and the reflective brilliance of 24-carat gold. Large-format compositions organized around signals, time and frequency suggest systems that exceed ordinary perception.
Across these different practices, the exhibition proposes landscape less as a genre than as a mode of consciousness. A horizon may suggest freedom or separation; a field of color can become an emotional climate; a material trace can evoke absence or presence. What appears before the eye is continually transformed by memory, desire, fear, cultural experience and imagination. The works ask viewers to consider how seeing the world is inseparable from seeing oneself.
The historic museums of Greiz provide a resonant setting for this encounter. Within spaces shaped by history and cultural memory, contemporary artistic positions introduce new perceptual and emotional territories. Past and present enter into dialogue, and the museum architecture itself becomes a meeting point between external surroundings and internal reflection.
Landscapes of the Soul / Seelenlandschaften invites visitors to move between these inner and outer spaces and to discover the shifting territories formed through encounters, memories, losses, hopes and transformations.
Curators
• Nour Nouri — Director of Pashmin Art
• Rainer Koch — Director of the Greiz Museums
• Dr. Davood Khazaie — International Curator
Realized by
• The Museums in the Castle and Royal Seat Town of Greiz, Greiz, Germany
• Pashmin Art Consortia, Hamburg, Germany
