Erik Niedling (*1973) is known as a conceptual photographer, who placed disappearance and the ephemeral at the center of several work series. As a result of a collaboration with the writer Ingo Niermann, ongoing since 2006, his artistic approach has taken a wholly new direction.

Following their work on the idea of the Great Pyramid, they produced the documentary The Future of Art together in 2010. In the form of a road movie, it tells of encounters with a number of protagonists in the contemporary art world (including Hans Ulrich Obrist, Boris Groys, Olafur Eliasson, Harald Falckenberg, Damien Hirst) and of the development of the Pyramid Mountain concept by Ingo Niermann: the plan is to cut a pyramid of at least 200 meters height from an existing mountain. After the burial of its owner, the pyramid is covered with the removed material once more, restoring the original geological form. While the idea (and funding!) for this work originally was tied to the figure of a single collector, at the end of the film shoot Ingo Niermann reallocated it to Erik Niedling, who has adopted it as a guiding idea for his artistic work.

The exhibition at Haus am Lützowplatz is based on the deliberations for the realization of Pyramid Mountain that followed Erik Niedling’s survival beyond February 29, 2012. He identifies the crossing of this date line as a veritable rebirth with a considerable impact on his artistic attitude and on the understanding of the role of artists in society. In addition to the Pyramid Paintings, in which Niedling uses the soot of discarded and destroyed paintings as colorants for abstract gestural notations, the computer-processed Pyramid Mountain Photographs are the focus of the exhibition that combines current works from the years 2012-2014. Only when Niedling has perfected his work on the Pyramid Paintings to the point that they unvaryingly satisfy him over a long sequence will the series find completion. After Niedling captured the soot of his scrapped works on glass plates in his Teilchen (2012) series, he now rubs it onto canvases in his Pyramid Paintings, creating a link to an imaging technology that harks all the way back to cave paintings. Niedling’s painting is a pause in the face of the oversized challenge of making the Pyramid Mountain a reality. The alternation of creation and destruction recalls the cycles of life, and the completion of the series resembles death in perfection.