AMIR FATTAL: I’M JUST HERE FOR THE POOL
KÖNIG MEXICO CITY is pleased to present I’m Just Here for the Pool, a solo exhibition by Amir Fattal. Fattal is an artist and curator based in Berlin. His practice is one of the reflection grounded in the history of aesthetics and cultural references.
February 3 – April 1, 2026
In this new exhibition, Fattal deepens his exploration of AI as both a tool and a mirror, an engine that exposes our collective desires around taste, aspiration, and cultural identity. Through architectural scenes, swimming pools, graphic murals, and carefully staged human figures, he examines how aesthetics function as social codes, especially within the visual language of mid-century modernism and contemporary “good taste.”
This exhibition places special attention on Mexico City, where Fattal has lived part-time for the past four years. The influence of Mexican modernist architecture, particularly the geometric clarity and emotional restraint of Luis Barragán, can be felt throughout the works. The paintings unfold like imagined memories of aspirational spaces: modern villas, sunlit courtyards, quiet pools, and curated walls that might exist somewhere between reality, cinema, and a social media feed.
Fattal’s protagonists inhabit these environments with a composed awareness, as if already performing for an audience. They are surrounded by architecture, artworks, and atmospheres carefully designed to convey identity. In this way, the paintings investigate how we choose to present ourselves, how desire, self-image, and the aesthetics of the art world are increasingly shaped by algorithms, and how our “good taste” is being learned and repeated through AI.
In this exhibition, architecture becomes psychology, and image becomes performance. The paintings invite us to reconsider how we see, how we aspire, and how art now speaks the language of both memory and data.
Amir Fattal (b.1978 Tel Aviv, Israel) is an artist and curator based in Berlin. Fattal’s practice is one of reflection grounded in the history of aesthetics and cultural references. Working in new technologies such as AI, 3D printing and digital animation, his work highlights their effects on creativity.
In his new series of Post Artificial Painting, Fattal reimagines classic art world scenarios for the 21st century. Amir Fattal starts each work with a series of prompts that coax forth a fictional portrait from the depths of AI’s ‘collective unconscious’. Then, employ traditional oil painting techniques on canvas to bring these AI-generated images to life, blurring the line between reality and imagination.
Fattal’s series proposes AI prompting as an intriguing new artistic technique in its own right, making one wonder what verbal incantations were used to create these vividly lifelike creatures who seem to have human backstories of their own. They are, in a word, aspirational, with the subtly coded “je ne sais quois” of a 21st century aristocracy - understated, dialed in, self-aware, and breathtakingly precise in their aesthetic. The portraits capture the zeitgeist uncannily, raising questions about how our collective data is used to dream up these non-existent humans, and how they reflect our society at large.