Yuri Yuan '21 has 'Wanderlust' in Debut European Solo Exhibition at Haverkampf Leistenschneider, Berlin

This summer, Yuri Yuan '21 brings Wanderlust to Haverkampf Leistenschneider, Berlin, in her debut solo exhibition in Europe. Gesturing toward geographic and emotional distance, Yuan portrays landscapes and domestic scenes in her signature flattened style. A woman, clad in a gray trenchcoat and cap, walks through a cemetery; a bluejay sips from a puddle; a hand pulls back a curtain, picks up a paintbrush. Wanderlust emphasizes passage over arrival, witness over judgement.

Wanderlust's motifs of distance and longing reference Caspar David Friedrich's Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog and Gustave Courbet's Bonjour, Monsieur Courbet—works Yuan encountered as a rising senior at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago while visiting the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin. According to a text she wrote to accompany the show, Yuan was traveling alone through Europe to visit as many museums as she could, when she found herself "hungry and broke, exhausted from walking ten hours a day, and beginning to run a fever." This is how she encountered Bonjour, Monsieur Courbet, a painting that she had pinned on her inspiration board since high school, ignited by Courbet's ambition to address class, nature, and social hierarchy in his paintings.

"So you see, when I saw Bonjour, I didn't just see Bonjour," Yuan wrote. "I saw the long journey I had taken, from China, to Singapore, to Chicago, to Berlin, and the journey the painting had taken, from Montpellier to Berlin, finally converging at that exact point in time and space, allowing me to see it in the flesh." When she was asked to present a solo show in Berlin in 2026, she knew she would title it after that exhibition at the Alte Nationalgalerie: Wanderlust.

Visual records of a biography shaped by movement and displacement, the paintings in Wanderlust capture the act of viewing and materialize imagined landscapes as metaphors for psychological states. The Dream of a Dream (152.5 x 122 cm, oil on linen, 2026), the conceptual centerpiece of the exhibition, represents the experience of the artist: a woman walking by a cemetery, portrayed more flatly, less saturated than her surroundings. "It could be interpreted that she is somehow separated from this world, or maybe this world is her imagination," writes Yuan. "The Artist is in this world, but not of this world." 

Yuan was a recipient of Columbia University's Helen Frankenthaler Scholarship in 2020 and the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant in 2019, 2022, and 2024. She was an artist-in-residence at Silver Art Projects Residency. Her work is represented in the public collections of Columbus Museum of Art (Columbus, OH), The Museum of Contemporary Art (San Diego, CA), and X Museum (Beijing, China). Yuan was listed in Forbes Magazine's "30 Under 30." Her works have been featured in the LA Times, The Brooklyn Rail, Hyperallergic, CULTURED Magazine, and Refinery29. Alexander Berggruen co-represents the artist with Make Room Gallery, LA. She lives and works in Jersey City, NJ.

Wanderlust is on view June 12–August 1, 2026, at Haverkampf Leistenschneider in Berlin.