Where Time Settles
August 25, 2026 – October 16, 2026
Koo Bona, Philipp-Emanuel Eyrich
Bode Gallery
Bona Koo x Philipp-Emanuel Eyrich - Where Time Settles
Every material carries its own story. It preserves traces of geological processes, human intervention, and natural changes, thereby becoming a vessel of memory, time, and transformation. The exhibition brings together two artistic approaches that view material not merely as a means of shaping form, but as a carrier of meaning in its own right. Drawing from different cultural contexts, South Korean artist Koo Bona and German sculptor Philipp Emanuel Eyrich create works in which nature and construction, permanence and change, as well as organic growth and human creation, engage in a multifaceted dialogue.
Koo Bona’s works are created through a slow process of layering and compacting. Ink penetrates deeply into the traditional hanji paper, forming a dark background from which fossils, plant forms, and geological structures emerge. Gold and silver pigments do not serve as decorative accents, but rather mark the transitions between light and darkness, past and present. The fragment becomes a symbol of a world that is constantly changing yet retains traces of its origins. Koo does not view nature as a landscape in the classical sense, but as a living cycle in which becoming and passing away are inextricably linked.
Philipp-Emanuel Eyrich, too, views material as a repository of history. His vases, cast in concrete, are reminiscent of both archaic rock formations and the clean lines of Brutalist architecture. As one of the oldest object forms in art history, the vase is stripped of its original function and reimagined as an autonomous sculpture. Its surfaces bear the traces of manual craftsmanship; light and shadow constantly reshape the reliefs, lending the massive forms
a surprising vitality. Eyrich combines natural growth processes with human construction and explores the fragile balance between organic development and the built environment.
In dialogue with one another, both positions open up different perspectives on the same fundamental question. Koo Bona condenses time into delicate layers and translucent pictorial spaces, while Eyrich makes it tangible as a physical mass and spatial presence. What settles in the depths of the paper in Koo’s work emerges as a sculptural surface in Eyrich’s. Both artists focus on elementary structures—layers, erosion, condensation, and processes of growth—in which the interactions between nature and culture, transience and permanence, manifest themselves. In this context, the material becomes not merely a vehicle for an idea, but an expression of constant change in and of itself.
The result is an exhibition that speaks less of contrasts than of resonances. The works transcend geographical and cultural boundaries and demonstrate that memory is not anchored solely in human beings, but lives on just as much in materials, landscapes, and the traces inscribed within them. Between paper and concrete, surface and form, a quiet dialogue unfolds about the cycles of life and the ceaseless transformation of the world.