By Robert Brune
ANDES — On the same Saturday that marching bands and floats paraded down Main Street for Andes Community Day, a different kind of spectacle unfolded just steps away. The Leo Koenig Gallery opened its latest exhibition, Colorland, a show teeming with chromatic bravado and global artistic gravitas. Gallery founder and curator Leo Koenig stood at the heart of it, speaking with guests and drawing connections between Gerhard Richter’s monumental Strip painting and the playful shimmer of Maximilian Schubert’s resin-formed illusions of canvas.
“You saw the last show. It had a certain heaviness to it,” Koenig reflected at the opening. “This one, I wanted it to be a little bit more light-footed… Color to play a big role… to stretch what painting is.”
Stretch it did. Featuring twelve international and New York-based artists, Colorland fills both floors of the historic Main Street building that houses the Koenig space, each with dramatically different atmospheres. “The downstairs is very prominent in architecture… windows and columns. Upstairs has this kind of tranquility,” Koenig explained. “It’s like two spaces, completely different energies.”
Anchoring the upstairs is a jaw-dropping 35-foot Gerhard Richter piece, a horizontal rainbow of digital abstraction that Koenig acquired at auction from a museum in China. “A multimillion-dollar painting,” he noted offhandedly, while in a conversation about the exhibition with a friend: “He’s like, ‘In Andes? Why?’ I’m like, why not? Why not in Andes, NY?”
From Richter to Rewilding
One of the exhibition's featured artists is Anke Weyer, a longtime Catskills resident and German-born painter who splits her time between studios in Bloomville and Manhattan. Her work Rewilding, completed outdoors in 2024, greets viewers with visceral brushstrokes and elemental rawness.
“I painted it on the ground,” Weyer shared in an interview at the reception. “I like to let the weather influence what I do… the light, the air, it’s part of the process. I don't start with an image. It's all abstraction. I try to reach some kind of harmony.”
Weyer resists easy interpretations of her work, she doesn’t see herself as a “nature painter” despite her open-air methods. “It’s more like the state of the world as I absorb it and then deal with it… not like I see the trees and they get into the painting like that,” she explained. “But yes, I prefer working outside. If I could paint outside in the city, I would. But I like living here. The light, the open space, it matters.”
A Light-Footed Masterclass
Colorland is anything but decorative fluff. Alongside the monumental Richter and Weyer's expressive abstraction are works by Pauline Shaw, who bridges textile and memory; Ethan Cook’s deceptively simple woven canvases; Gabriele Adomaityte’s emotional oil studies; and Schubert’s uncanny polyurethane “paintings,” which glow with internal luminescence. The list also includes Jana Schroder, Allan McCollum, Wolfgang Tillmans, Greg Brogan, Anselm Reyle, and sculptor Richard Serra, each piece interplaying with the others to form a show that’s intellectually robust and visually jubilant.
Koenig credits an intuitive curatorial process. “It just kind of built from there,” he said. “After Richter came Serra, then Schubert, then Anke Weyer. I’ve known her a long time. She was one of the first I asked.”
Art in the Mountains
Koenig also hinted at long-term plans to document this burgeoning Catskills program through an annual publication, an archival gesture aimed at preserving the energy of these shows and the unique setting. “We’re going to do something for the sequence of shows here in Andes… I’m hiring a portrait or interior photographer, not an art photographer. Because the light, the building, this space, it deserves it.”
Andes may be better known for parades and farm stands than avant-garde art, but Koenig’s presence here is reshaping that narrative. Colorland proves that museum-quality exhibitions can, and should, exist off the beaten path.
Featured Artists in ‘Colorland’: Gerhard Richter, Richard Serra, Anke Weyer, Jana Schroder, Pauline Shaw, Allan McCollum, Ethan Cook, Wolfgang Tillmans, Gabriele Adomaityte, Maximilian Schubert, Greg Brogan, and Anselm Reyle.
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