Highlight’s Jake Allen reports from Berlin on AGH 1, a single-day exhibition with mints opening on December 13

I just got back from Berlin for AGH 1—a collaborative show between Andreas Gysin, Kim Asendorf, and Leander Herzog, supported by Grailers, Fingerprints and Highlight. I wanted to share a bit about the experience and a few simple impressions of the show.

The show itself took place at Funkhaus, which was apparently an old radio building at one point. There was a bit of disagreement about that because this particular part of it was enormous and industrial. Finding it was like traversing a maze, and someone remarked that was part of the charm of the place. It felt like 30 degrees Fahrenheit inside, despite the heating system, likely because of the enormous ceilings and lack of insulation on old windows and doors.

The screen itself was about 10-12 feet tall, and proved an excellent way to view the work. I was somewhat surprised by this—I tend to assume that alone at home in front of a browser is the best way to view this kind of work, and that everything else is just a standin. But the scale really did add something interesting to the viewing experience beyond its impressive size and quality.

Leander’s work, titled Heatsink, worked well at this scale because it was extremely detailed and you could see more of the grid with closer inspection. I liked the colors of these works, like warm almost pastel neons—a welcome bath of light in the cold space. Kim’s work, titled Alternate, worked well for the opposite reason actually. It featured more bold and broad lines than his other works, which made for enormous moving icebergs of color, somewhat slow and hypnotic. (Outland did an excellent job reviewing the work and I won’t try to one up them here.) Andreas’ work, titled Crush, worked really well at night because the background was black, and the venue stayed dark so the whirling text floated in space and the overall brightness wasn't overpowering. Many of his works were black and white, but when color came in it almost felt like they were bleeding in from Kim’s and Leander’s pieces. The screen rotated every 5 minutes between the three works.

Watching the three of them set up the screen, walking around inspecting the pixels, helping each other make last minute tweaks to their works, gave some glimpse into the collaborative process between the three of them, which was very organic, loose, and collegial. Kim iterated on some custom music for the evening, and the crew settled on some whooshing bass sounds that played all night, so the venue felt like the bottom of the ocean or a freezing womb. One gets the sense there's a real warmth between them, and they’ve spoken in the past about how a sense of shared aesthetic and craftsmanship has brought them together:

“We had this long-term vision to eventually start something together because people started mentioning our names together and we felt like we aligned on many things. We have similar tastes when it comes to aesthetics and many other things.”

Leander Herzog, from a piece about the group in Le Random

They might not frame it this way, but another similarity they all share is a deep history in the space, with a large body of work that extends quite a ways further back than the relatively brief history of NFTs. Leander has been making art since 2006, Andreas for over 20 years. Kim is often credited with inventing a new kind of pixel sorting, a technique whose prevalence and impact is hard to overstate and which he talks about in a recent Waiting to be Signed podcast. And yet each of them has achieved a degree of renown in the NFT space, even cult followings, without need for much in the way of credentials.

Berlin is dark and cold right now, the show felt like a welcome chance to gather, admire the works together, and meet old friends. I’m looking forward to seeing the releases this Wednesday, December 13th. You can find release dates and information about the works themselves here: