Pace Gallery Berlin stages an unconventional exhibition centered on the aesthetics and psychology of nightlife. "Goodbye Sadness, Hello Sadness" brings together 27 artists working across installation, sculpture, painting, and photography to interrogate the emotional landscape of night culture.
The exhibition's centerpiece is "Bar Va Bene" (2026), a fully functional recreation of artist Friedrich Kunath's Los Angeles studio bar. This immersive environment serves as both artwork and social space, collapsing boundaries between gallery experience and lived environment. The piece exemplifies a broader curatorial strategy that treats nightlife not as subject matter but as experiential territory. Visitors move through the space as participants rather than passive viewers.
The exhibition responds to a growing conversation in contemporary art about leisure, escape, and the psychology of nocturnal spaces. Berlin's legendary nightlife culture provides obvious contextual weight here. Pace's decision to stage the show in the German capital speaks to the city's outsized influence on global club and electronic music aesthetics.
The 27 participating artists approach night through varied lenses. Some address the euphoria and transcendence associated with dancefloor culture. Others interrogate loneliness, alienation, and the melancholic undercurrents that run beneath hedonistic surfaces. The exhibition title itself signals this emotional duality, rejecting binary readings of nightlife as purely celebratory or destructive.
Pace Gallery has long positioned itself as a space willing to blur institutional boundaries. This exhibition continues that trajectory, treating the gallery less as white cube and more as experimental site. The inclusion of a working bar pushes further into territory that challenges traditional exhibition formats.
The show arrives as nightlife continues its cultural reassessment post-pandemic. What constitutes community gathering, collective experience, and public space remains contested terrain. "Goodbye Sadness, Hello Sad