Berlin has the coordination London lacks, and so it is that the annual Berlin Gallery Weekend sees 55 galleries on the official programme and at least as many other galleries all opening new shows on Friday 29 April. That makes for a highly energetic weekend! You can’t see a hundred exhibitions in that time, so rather than claiming to judge what shows were best, here are eight works that I liked. They’re linked by the somewhat ironic theme – as I rushed from show to show – of waiting around while time passes. The Gallery Weekend shows carry on, of course, if you’re in Berlin in the next few weeks…
Britta Thie: Drone, 2023 at Wentrup (top)
Young German multimedia artist Britta Thie also works as an actor. That involves plenty of waiting around on set. The time to look around led her into a contemporary form of still life: paintings of the technical equipment used on a film set. Here’s her atmospheric rendition of a relatively recent addition to the essentials.
Reba Maybury: Amanda, British civil servant, 50, Blackpool, 2022 at Efremedis
On to another profession with plenty of waiting around. Here London-based Reba Maybury, who has ‘political subs’ who obey her demands as if she was a dominatrix, had them fill in paint-by-numbers versions of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s ‘The Medical Examination’ (1894), depicting sex workers waiting to be checked for syphilis. Maybury invites us to consider parallels, including in the art world, for the complicated power relationships involved.
Thomas Helbig: Sphinx, 2017 at ‘Ufer’
Security is another wait-about role, as in the employment of sphinxes to guard temples. The mythic original has the head of a woman, haunches of a lion and wings of a bird, and kills anyone who can’t answer a riddle. Thomas Helbig’s artfully glimpsed version doesn’t look so fierce. Helbig shows with Guido W, Baudach, but this was in an artist-run – and artist-invigilated – pop-up called ‘Ufer’.
Kapwani Kiwanga: Shifting Sands (gold/blue), 2023 at Galerie Tanja Wagner
Kapwani’s ‘hour glass’ sculptures elegantly combine sand with glass made from it. She uses silica sand, a particularly regular and round-grained type used in fracking (if you’re curious about the sand and its role, go here). It’s being extracted fast currently, so these ‘hour glass’ series may be counting down the time to a sand-scarce future.
Raphaela Simon: Eiswürfel (Ice Cube), 2023 at Max Hetzler
Perhaps Raphaela Simon pushes the ‘hang out, stay cool’ vibe a little too far in this painting of an apparently severed head frozen in a block of ice. It’s from her ‘Nighthawks’, a whole show of greyly anonymised and rather spooky figures at one of Max Hetzler’s four (!) Berlin spaces.
Kris Martin: I can wait, 2021 at Koenig
Koenig’s one Berlin space may have more capacity than Hetzler’s four, with three substantial exhibitions spaces, a sculpture garden, and a vast showroom. Here wide-ranging Belgian artist Kris Martin plays with geological time by suggesting that a rock could be pretty relaxed about a term of imprisonment.
Andreas Eriksson, Untitled, 2022 at neugerriemschneider,
Not content with covid’s enforced lockdowns, Andreas Eriksson chose to spend 2022 in elective isolation in his studio in rural Sweden, delivering no new work and taking part in no exhibitions. The results shown in ‘year in, year out’ include a cycle of dark paintings evoking the shortening days of autumn as well as brightly-pigmented works such as this one, indicative of an emergence into spring.
Miguel Rothschild: The eternity of Night II, 2022/23 at Kuckei + Kuckei
Night is the expected time for inactivity. Miguel Rothschild keeps its lights dark by using a hammer to fracture stars into angularly circular forms to link beauty, mystery and violence.
As for the best shows – the ones in which I hung out the most, I suppose – I’d go with Michael Rakowitz at Barbara Wien, Alexandra Bircken at BQ, Hiwa K at KOW and Monira Al Qadiri at Koenig…
