There are a lot of galleries in Berlin and matters are well coordinated. So it is that, at the end of April, 50 leading galleries open simultaneously for the annual Gallery Weekend. Moreover, most other galleries take the chance to open at the same time. There are good shows to be found in both categories, so here is a democratic choice of five from the official program followed by five others.
The German artist likes to challenge the conventions of the adult and art worlds by making her sculpture in the form of soft toys. Here the titular pun merges putative glamour à la Mae West into an emergency call – perhaps for the consumer society, perhaps for the world. Von Bonin is particularly inspired by Daffy Duck, and by how the cartoon character’s inventor, Chuck Jones, once claimed that Daffy was actually a chicken in drag/ These whales, cheerfully perched on swings, are lobsters in drag. One on them is labelled ‘WE’, the other ‘’THEY’, which hardly helps the confusion. It seems enough to drive ‘WE’ to drink.
I would think half the shows during gallery weekend were of painting. Plenty of those could be described as ‘expanded painting’. Most often the expansion was sculptural or spatial, but in the case of Nevin Aladag, there was also sound: her ‘Vibrating Images’ can operate as instruments, in which guise they were activated over the weekend. Writing for the gallery, Dominikus Muller neatly characterised this as ‘literally setting media categories’ – such as what is painting – ‘into vibration’.
There’s plenty going on in the cross-cultural mix of the Berlin-based Franco-Indian’s show ‘Buti Blossom’ at PSM – in huge sculptures and various paintings. This is from a series in which the backs of bodies dominate the entire surface of the canvas. For Husain that symbolises the ‘behind’ and the ‘not shown’, saying she wants to ‘show something, but at the same time I don’t show something, because there is never a centre. I don’t construct a subject, there are layers, transparencies, and translucence… It contradicts the European tradition of art history, where it’s more about the very visible and obvious: a topic, a subject, communicating power’. What we see on the backs combines Indian Hamzanama miniatures of men fighting, upended to women loving; the traditional Indo-Persian ‘Buti’ textile motif of repeated images of either a flower or a single figure; iconic European tropes; and offsetting on-the-skin features such as real jewellery. All of which hybridisation ends up not as the mess you might anticipate, but as decoratively alluring…
Max Hezler has the capacity for three big shows across his four Berlin spaces and presented what you might call big beasts of painting in all of them. The Potsdamer straße gallery proves big enough to show 71 of the two metre high ‘butterfly drawings’ that Mark Grotjahn makes obsessively on his kitchen table; Sean Scully remixes his motifs across the two smaller Charlottenburg spaces; and Tal R at Goethestraße – in a more substantial shift from previous work – showed large, irregularly shaped paintings that made me think of keyholes, suggesting a glimpsed partial view to be completed: their abstract play resolves into depictions of Icelandic lakes in non-naturalistic colours. Gallery Weekend, just to be different, was actually the last for the Dane’s show…
Here New York based German Markus Linnenbrink poured his characteristic material – brightly coloured epoxy resin – into a shaped support six feet wide, removing it when dry. He then cut into it with an industrial router pushed by compressed air, which he describes as like ‘drawing with a joystick’. The convoluted rhythmic result is mounted on board, with an overhang allowed to effect a shapely outline. Linnenbrink has long used merged phrases as his titles, artfully slowing our comprehension of how the combination of colours and words triggers emotional reactions, somewhat in the manner of the songs from which his titles often originate. Part of a show which also features his related ‘drills’, ‘drips’ and ‘spheres’.
The main installation in what is – surprisingly – the London-based collaborative’s first solo show in Germany, populates a whole-room of silvery silicon wasteland with thistles. It’s striking even before – in an inspired coup de theatre – we notice that the thistles are moving with an eeriness resembling occasional breathing. The conjunction hints at the collapsing distinctions between humans, other life forms, and machines. Plants – now known to be much more communicative than previously assumed – emerge from the material basis of the hardware that enables artificial intelligence to make their own challenge to any human claim to be uniquely conscious. Ah yes, ‘anima’ is breath or soul in Latin; ‘atman’ has a similar meaning in Indian philosophy, where it extends to cover the essence of every existence, including animals and plants.
Barbara Probst demonstrates the subjectivity of experience by showing the same scene from different viewpoints. In 2000, she began taking multiple images of actors, shot simultaneously with several cameras via a radio-controlled system. Her Berlin gallery had an early work applying this to a simple double portrait format, and cityscapes using this approach from the last decade – and also showed me this example made in the museum where her forthcoming retrospective begins (moving on to Hannover and Cincinnati). It’s hard at first to believe that this is one time and place – but the figure in a dress is standing on top of one wallpaper and in front of another…
I spotted only two – maximally contrasting – solo shows by British artists: Gallery Hua has the latest spectacular advancement of Jenkin Van Zyl’s metaphor-laden dance marathons featuring rat-like doppelgänger couples in states of exhaustion; Galerie Robert Morat presents Hannah Hughes’ subtly bodily collages, complemented by ceramic sculptures derived from pulp packaging. The form here is constructed from the space between things – Hughes extracts the negative spaces between people or objects in magazine images – so what we’re seeing isn’t so much abstraction as the abstract elements between representations. My last choice also brings abstract and figurative together in a surprising way…
Toronto-based Vickie Vainionpää uses software to generate organic shapes in 3D as the basis for her paintings. Her latest ‘Gaze Series’ creates those forms from the results of eye-tracking software that follows her own paths of looking at famous paintings. Details from the painting in question are then spirited into the abstract form, making for a cunning inflexion of figuration. ‘Scorn’, I reckon, analyses the viewing of a Veronese in the National Gallery, giving me a good reason to close with a great painting that wasn’t in Berlin…
