How Hans Uhlmann Created New Forms for a New World @ Berlinische Galerie in Berlin

 
 

Hans Uhlmann's (1900–1975) abstract metal sculptures and drawings shaped the image of German post-war modernism. Berlinische Galerie’s current exhibition traces his creative periods from the 1930s to the 1970s. Using around 80 works - sculptures, drawings, photographs and archive material - it also examines his role as a curator, university teacher and networker in post-war West Berlin. It is the first comprehensive retrospective in more than 50 years.

Experimental molding is on view through May 13th at Berlinische Galerie, Alte Jakobstraße 124-128, 10969 Berlin.

Branding as Rebellion in THE CARDS YOU WERE DEALT @ Dittrich & Schlechtriem in Berlin

 
 

Last week, Monty Richthofen performed THE CARDS YOU WERE DEALT, a corporeal intervention in which he explored the concepts of choice, transgenerational dialogue, and transformation through tattooing. Seven participants were randomly selected. In the project, three texts were presented to the chosen participant. These texts are all accounts of 21st century phenomena. If a participant agreed to get one of the texts tattooed, they then got to choose three other texts for the following participant. The placement and composition of the text were decided collaboratively with the artist. The tattoos form a coherent text piece, a physical exquisite corpse, that is painted on a light box, echoing our individual but interconnected experience. THE CARDS YOU WERE DEALT was first performed in September 2023 and most recently included in the 2023 Gallery Weekend Berlin.

THE CARDS YOU WERE DEALT was performed at Dittrich & Schlechtriem, Linienstraße 23, 10178 Berlin.

Garish Queerness as a Mode of Restoration in Pierre le Riche's New Show @ Ronewa Art Projects in Berlin

In Pierre le Riche’s current exhibition, In Four Places at Once, the artist creates vivid figurative wall tapestries that center his queer identity while reflecting on the complexities of belonging in a contemporary world. Identity is woven into and essential to le Riche’s practice; much of his work has been aimed at challenging norms and associations around gender and sexuality and confronting themes of colonialism and white privilege. The group of artworks on show emerged from a period of internal struggle as le Riche acclimatized to a new environment following his move from Cape Town to Aachen, Germany. In this light, le Riche’s choice of tufted yarn as a material, reminiscent of cozy household textiles, feels fitting to conjure a homesick state of yearning and introspection. Le Riche’s use of craft – elsewhere in his practice he also employs embroidery, sewing, and crochet – tosses out outdated notions of gendered art forms. Through his homoerotic content, le Riche pushes back against the conservativeness of a middle-class, suburban upbringing in Post-Apartheid South Africa. His cartoonish nude figures, some sporting exaggerated genitalia, can be read as playfully provocative and unapologetically gay, testing the boundaries of puritanical sensibilities. Simultaneously, his characters are contorted and dislocated in space, imbued with vulnerability, uncertainty, and longing.

In Four Places at Once is on view through March 28th at Ronewa Art Projects, Potsdamer Str. 91, 10785 Berlin.

Non-Specific Objects Carves Niches for Difference from Universality @ Capitain Petzel in Berlin

The title of Non-Specific Objects acts as a counterpoint to the ideas expressed in Donald Judd’s canonical 1964 essay Specific Objects. Seeing as Judd characterized specific objects as separate from either sculpture or painting, they were precisely themselves, emphasizing the very materiality of a specific object that lacked expressive or symbolic content, especially to embodied subjectivity. This universal space, which aimed to be all-encompassing, did not make room for gender, racial, and sexual difference. The artists in this exhibition work against the hegemonic universal, creating space for difference in their works by means of abstraction, referencing bodies both literally and metaphorically.

The selection of works collectively embodies the contemporary lived experience of those who occupy spaces outside the normative. While they often do not overtly mirror the human form, the works represent humanity through a lens of abstraction and resistance, inviting viewers to confront themselves and experience bodily otherness. From alienation and embarrassment to intimacy and desire, the artists offer both the possibility of self-reflection and shared moments of humor.

In focus is the abstracted body – be it the intimate nature, materiality, and particularities of the individual human body, the collective body that is built on shared historic experience, the extended and amplified body in an age of relentless augmentation, or the body that eschews realistic painterly modes of representation, opting for formally abstract or heavily stylized, sometimes nostalgic renditions of humanity. The diverse set of artistic practices does not adhere to strict principles of representation, but continually references the human, sometimes clearly and often obliquely. It highlights objects that refuse human form but relate to the human by embracing abstraction.

Non-Specific Objects is on view through February 24th at Capitain Petzel, Karl-Marx-Allee 45, 10178 Berlin.

Wolfgang Voigt Births Rich Yet Minimalist Psychedelia with the Loop Principle @ Galerie Nagel Draxler in Berlin

In both his musical and pictorial work, Wolfgang Voigt predominantly adheres to strict conceptual principles, which he refines and diversifies consistently. Alongside his mostly sample-based, rather free-abstract to gestural musical and figurative language, it is primarily the “loop principle” that has always fascinated Voigt. The static or varied repetition of minimalistic structures creates certain patterns, grooves, and shapes. This way of thinking is shaped not least by the structure of computer-based music programs, permeating Voigt’s work in various ways.

Whether navigating the tension between 4/4th bass drum-based groove patterns and condensed visual sequences/loops, or reopening the loops and engaging in free-abstract deconstruction (re-enchantment/de-interpretation) – for Wolfgang Voigt, sampling and “the loop” represents a way of perceiving the world. Even when adhering to certain rules and concepts in selecting and processing his source material, he intentionally allows deviations to emerge, often locating what he is “looking for” not in the intended location but in its vicinity. In the virtuoso interplay between “man and machine” he is consistently focused on the simultaneity of strict conceptual minimalism and the hypnotic-psychedelic effect of beginninglessness and endlessness. This encompassed the conceptual-rational observation of surfaces through digital pop art lenses and the creation of intoxicating, shimmering surfaces. And it involves the negation of predictability.

Mit Maschinen Sprechen is on view through April 13th at Galerie Nagel Draxler, Weydingerstraße 2/4, 10178 Berlin.

Springtime at the Scottsdale, Arizona Walmart Turns Commercial Landscapes into Sites of Nostalgic Mundanity @ Galerie Max Hetzler

Known for his paintings of man-made and natural landscapes, Jake Longstreth depicts American suburban and rural scenes with a clarity that is at once disquieting and subtly humorous. Devoid of human presence and bathed in perpetual midday light, these landscapes – among them American big box stores and chain restaurants – draw out a poetry of the everyday with a surprising warmth and painterly affection. Though American commercial developments may be considered a crass or ugly subject matter, Longstreth’s sunny neutrality underscores the fact that most Americans find them neither bleak nor remarkable. So ubiquitous that they are rarely truly seen, the stores and restaurants depicted in these compositions comprise a 21st-century version of the American commons. Longstreth encourages us to linger, be still, look. We might ask ourselves: What has become of these landscapes? What will become of them? Beyond the signature quietude of Longstreth’s landscapes, this body of work underscores the artist’s astute observation of landscapes in transformation. Revealed from unusual vantage points, tenderly rendered wildflowers, foliage, and trees cast dappled shadows on their surroundings, literally and metaphorically throwing into relief the cultivated domain that surrounds them.

Springtime at the Scottsdale, Arizona Walmart, is on view through March 2nd at Galerie Max Hetzler, Bleibtreustraße 15/16, Berlin.

Günther Förg's Diverse Utopia-Critical Body of Work Dissected @ Galerie Max Hetzler

 
 

Günther Förg’s comprehensive and multidisciplinary oeuvre, which spans five decades, includes painting, drawing, and murals, as well as sculpture and photography. The focus is on material, color, and space. The artist's experimental approach to abstraction and monochrome painting was directed against the trend toward figuration that prevailed in Germany in the 1980s. His works made continuous reference to 20th-century modernism, whose utopia he critically questioned. In this context, he engaged with art movements as diverse as early modernism, referencing artists such as Edvard Munch, or the American abstract expressionists including Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, and Cy Twombly. Elements of conceptual art can also be found throughout Förg’s work, which additionally challenge traditional interpretations.

Günther Förg is on view through February 24th at Galerie Max Hetzler, Bleibtreustraße 45, Berlin.

Gil Kuno's Early Internet Exploration Remains an Electric Testament to Online Creativity in Solo Exhibition @ panke.gallery in Berlin

Gil Kuno’s work is an intricate tapestry of sound art, installations, and video art. His current solo exhibition at Panke Gallery exhibits his earliest art creations – those created on the Internet in the 90s. 2024 marks the 30th anniversary of the first of these creations, Unsound. "Unsound.com" (1994) was a pioneering media experiment that fused sight and sound, allowing users to interactively engage with artists' works in both visual and audio formats. Through crowd-sourcing, it facilitated artistic curation by audience votes – an innovation that even captured the admiration of Timothy Leary, who subsequently endorsed the site. In 1996, Gil Kuno introduced Wiggle, the world's first Internet band. This groundbreaking endeavour leveraged the Internet's connectivity to forge musical collaborations across geographical boundaries, culminating in a band composed of members from Japan, Australia, and the United States. They achieved a major label deal and released multiple albums, all while some band members remained faceless due to their geographically dispersed nature.

Unsound: The Shape of Sound is on view through December 20th at panke.gallery, Hof V, Gerichtstraße 23, 13347 Berlin.

Irony and Intimacy Intersect in Lovers in the Backseat @ FeldbuschWiesnerRudolph in Berlin

“‘Lovers in the Backseat’ refers to romantic and intimate relationships. Everything we do happens because we can't help it: Breathing, living, loving and creating art, these are our common elementary needs." (A.N. & R.S.)

The connection between the works of Robert Schittko and Anna Nero lies in the exploration of identity, playfulness and irony, as well as a slight sexiness that resonates in both artistic practices. They take the exhibition visitor on the "back seat", behind their shoulders, on the motorway, country road or overtaking lane - always on the way, but where are they actually going...? Both Nero and Schittko harbor an aversion to self-referential art. Instead, they explore the self in their studios and transform their lives into a vivid artistic practice. Each in their own way: Schittko's sculptural and photographic art focuses on the development of their own identity. Nero provokes with her abstract-representational paintings and ceramics.

Lovers in the Backseat is on view through January 6th at FeldbuschWiesnerRudolph, Jägerstraße 5, 10117 Berlin.

"Portraiture as Social Commentary" Showcases the Genre's Explosive Social Capital @ Persons Projects in Berlin

 

Zofia Kulik
Land-Escape I (2001)
silver gelatin print, 180 x 150 cm

 

Persons Projects’ latest group exhibition, Portraiture as Social Commentary, not only highlights the different aspects of the genre but also links together a variety of artistic perspectives. A portrait is a painting, a photograph, a sculpture, or any other representation of a person in which the face and its expressions are predominant. They reveal the presence of the subject viewed from the perspective of the artist – a merger of contrasts between what’s projected by one and perceived by another. These images become mirrors of many faces that reflect both the political and cultural undercurrents relevant to the time period in which they were conceived.

Portraiture as Social Commentary is on view through January 27th, 2024, at Persons Projects, Lindenstr. 34–35, 10969 Berlin.

Jota Mombaça Uses Berlin's Decompositional History to Slow Time for Mourning @ CCA Berlin

A CERTAIN DEATH/THE SWAMP, Jota Momaça’s exhibition at CCA Berlin – Center for Contemporary Arts, was conceived, at first, through extensive conversations around the curious topography of Berlin, said to be entirely built atop drained wetlands. From swamp to city, a teleology of progress, a survival scheme, emerges. Looking at the devastating flash floods of 2021 that affected parts of Belgium, Germany and surrounding countries, Mombaça then conjures up reversal—what of cities that again turn into swamps, a form of dissolution fascists went in terror of (‘Drenare la palude!’, once howled a determined Benito Mussolini) throughout the twentieth century? From Berlin’s locality, we shift our gaze towards a planetary predicament: that of atmospheric phenomena continuously threatening terminal collapse across disparate geographies. until the last morning (2023), a newly commissioned video work, was shot among the mangroves and marshlands of Pará, in the Brazilian Amazon. Covering about 700,000 hectares, these mangroves and marshlands depend on a constant influx of fresh water from rainfall and from the Guajará Bay rivers and streams. To that end, the camera pans to the sky, observing cloud formations, their movements and maneuvers. The ecosystem’s survival depends on this unpredictable choreography—to observe the weather is thus to forecast whether or not a line of continuity can be drawn into the future. 

A CERTAIN DEATH/THE SWAMP is on view through December 2nd at CCA Berlin, Kurfürstenstraße 145, 10785 Berlin.

"Magic of The North" Retrospective Delves into Munch's Lights and Shadows @ Berlinische Galerie in Berlin

Edvard Munch challenged his contemporaries with the radical modernity of his paintings, especially in Berlin, where the Norwegian symbolist exerted a big influence around the turn of the century. The exhibition Magic of the North is a partnership with the MUNCH in Oslo. It tells the story of Edvard Munch and Berlin, illustrated by paintings, prints, and photographs.

The German capital was in the grip of a fervor for all things Nordic. Even the conservative Association of Berlin Artists invited the young artist, as yet unknown, to put on a solo exhibition in 1892. Viewers were shocked by the bright colors and perceived the paintings as sketchy. The show was forced to close shortly after opening. Munch’s works polarized people. The artist delighted in this public attention. He moved to the Spree, living and working in the city again and again between 1892 and 1908. The “Munch Affair”, as the press sardonically labeled the scandal, is seen as the beginning of Modernism in Berlin.

 
 

Magic of the North is on view through January 22nd at Berlinische Galerie, Berlin’s Museum of Modern Art, Photography and Architecture Alte Jakobstraße 124–128, 10969 Berlin.

Nasan Tur Interrogates the Uses of Power through Lifelessness in Hunted @ Berlinische Galerie in Berlin

Nasan Tur deals with the political and social conditions of our time. His works are experimental arrangements that make ideologies, social norms and behavior patterns visible and expand them to include possibilities for individual action. To do this, he examines statements, gestures and images that he finds in the media and public space and condenses them into miniatures of current social crises and discourses. The focus is on the question of how predetermined role models influence us and when we are ready to cross boundaries and actively change social patterns in the face of oppression, powerlessness and manipulation.

New works were created for Hunted, his current exhibition at Berlinische Galerie, which deal with questions of the exercise of power and its legitimacy. Why do people kill? What violence lies within us, and how and under what circumstances is it activated? By arranging the works in space, Tur creates images that express an ambivalent attitude toward death and life. They range from confronting one's own inner demons to questioning hunters and the act of killing to the careful staging of lifeless animals in space.

Hunted is on view through April 1st at Berlinische Galerie, Berlin’s Museum of Modern Art, Photography and Architecture Alte Jakobstraße 124–128, 10969 Berlin.

Tomorrow, I Will Become an Island Charts Coco Fusco's Radical Path of Social Reckoning @ KW Institute in Berlin

Tomorrow, I Will Become an Island is the first major retrospective of Cuban-American artist Coco Fusco (b. 1960, US). For more than three decades, she has been a key voice in discourses on racial representation, feminism, postcolonial theory, and institutional critique. The exhibition seeks to trace the profound influence that Fusco’s work has had on contemporary art discourses in the Americas and Europe. To do so, it features a broad selection of the artist’s videos, photography, texts, installations, and live performances from the 1990s to the present day.

With her multidisciplinary practice, Fusco explores the ways that intercultural dynamics affect the construction of the self and ideas about cultural otherness. Her work is informed by multicultural and postcolonial discourses as well as feminist and psychoanalytic theories. Her investigation of intercultural dynamics has led her to develop art projects about ethnographic displays, animal psychology, sex tourism in the Caribbean, labor conditions in free trade zones, suppressed colonial records of Indigenous struggles, and the military interrogation techniques used in the war on terror. Her more recent work focuses on the relationship between poetry and revolutionary politics in Cuba.
The exhibition is loosely structured along these various interconnected themes. As such, Tomorrow, I Will Become an Island shows the breadth of Fusco’s artistic practice that is highly relevant considering current political and cultural debates in Germany and beyond.

Tomorrow, I Will Become an Island is on view through January 24th, 2024, at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin at Auguststraße 69, 10117 Berlin, Germany

Young-jun Tak Queers Religious Artifacts and Disassembles Mechanical Masculinity in His Exhibition @ JS Foundation in Berlin and Düsseldorf

At both the Düsseldorf and Berlin locations of the Julia Stoscheck Foundation, Berlin-based artist Young-jun Tak presents two recent films, Wish You a Lovely Sunday (2021) and Wohin? (2022), which will play in a loop in the galleries. Both shot in Berlin, these works consider how place, architecture, movement, and belief inform community and queerness.

 Wish You a Lovely Sunday (2021) juxtaposes two locations in Berlin: the church Kirche am Südstern and the queer club SchwuZ. Invited by the artist, two choreographers and two dancers were paired to create a new choreography for each space and assigned a different Bach piano piece for four hands. After days of rehearsals and once the choreography was complete, their originally designated venues were swapped for the filming. The participants therefore had to adapt their choreographies spontaneously according to the architectural features and atmosphere of the other space. By setting these two sites in dialogue, Tak proposes an improbable coexistence of religious practice and club culture. Tak is intrigued by the similarities between churches and clubs because they both involve specific rituals, behavioral norms, and attitudes closely linked to the space and its role. Over the course of Wish You a Lovely Sunday, the combination of the characters’ bodily presence and their navigation of their respective surroundings starts to shift the meaning of each location, eventually revealing tensions that were not apparent on the surface. In the church, the pair’s game of looking or not looking at one another while roaming around the columns and altar expresses unmistakable sensations of longing and desire, denial and prohibition.

In the film Wohin? (2022)—“Where to?” in German—the camera focuses on the rearview mirrors of cars that are driving on the Autobahn near Berlin. Throughout the film, various objects hung from the mirrors of each car become visible in the frame, from Christian rosaries and Buddhist prayer beads to a typical German air freshener, Wunderbaum. The rearview mirrors also reflect situations taking place on the back seat: a man gazes out of the window, checks his phone, or dozes off; two men kiss romantically. Prior to filming, Tak spoke with the actors about the many facets of the German Autobahn—an ideological project of the Third Reich and a feat of national infrastructure, as well as a playground for the projections of hypermasculinity, and a significant site for gay cruising. These mixed aspects are reinforced by the soundtrack, which pairs organist Andreas Sieling from the Berlin Cathedral with British countertenor Tim Morgan, who together reinterpret Kraftwerk’s legendary song “Autobahn” from 1974. While Sieling is peddling away at his huge organ with over 7,000 pipes, some of which are thirteen meters long, Morgan repeats the simple lyric “autobahn” in his fluid, high-pitched song, in contrast to the organ’s mechanical and militaristic rhythm.

Double Feature: Young-jun Tak is on view through December 17th at the Julia Stoschek Foundation, Leipziger Strasse 60, D-10117 Berlin, and JSF Düsseldorf, Schanzenstrasse 55, 40549 Düsseldorf.

Subjects Rebel Against the Confines of the Camera in Unbound: Performance As Rupture @ JS Foundation in Berlin

The group exhibition Unbound: Performance as Rupture examines how different generations of artists have called upon the body in relation to the camera to refuse oppressive ideologies, disrupt historical narratives, and unsettle concepts of identity.

The exhibition traces various intersections of performance and video art from the late 1960s to today, focusing on how they create specific forms of rupture, fracture, and pause. In contrast to Peggy Phelan’s definition of performance as a live art characterized by its immediate disappearance, Unbound centers the use of the camera and its apparatus to record and direct the performance itself. By willfully conflating the presence of performance and the virtuality of the image, the artists question a fundamental paradox—or representational gap—between the performing subject, whose complex identity can never be depicted fully, and the camera as a violent tool that tries to capture, contain, and classify them. Many of these works expose and negate the colonial gaze perpetuated by the camera, while simultaneously utilizing time-based technologies, in order to create otherwise impossible connections across spaces and temporalities. In addition to performance documentation and performance-for-the-camera, the exhibited artworks offer investigations into contemporary image economies that draw attention to how bodies move through or evade physical and digital spaces.

Unbound: Performance as Rupture is on view through July 28th, 2024, at the Julia Stoschek Foundation, Leipziger Strasse 60, D-10117 Berlin.

crosslucid Manifests Human Stories through Artificial Intelligence in Dwellers Between the Waters @ ACUD Galerie in Berlin

‘Dwellers Between the Waters’ (2023) is conjured as a series of hybrid rituals that mediate the space between physical presence, trauma, memory, healing, and virtuality. Polyphonic in its artificially intelligent framework, Dwellers Between the Waters could be experienced as a happening that is chanted by various elemental entities such as waters, winds, earth, air, algorithm... as well as poetry, history, magic, human and more-than-human creatures. This happening of digital rituals questions the singularity of humanist perception of reality. Co-performing with artificial intelligence, it attempts to create alternative epistemologies and outlooks on (so-called) reality through rendering multi-focal narratives and embedding the psycho-magical practice in forms of living ‘sigils’.

Combing artificial intelligence with the practice of magic and alchemy, Dwellers Between the Waters seeks possible solutions in response to the traumas of the contemporary anthropos, and examines how artificial intelligence, in terms of artistic practice, remains integral to our contemporary condition, that is, the ever-evolving climate crisis and the sixth extinction of species coupled with wars, inflation, and capitalist exploitation. By evoking, cultivating, and connecting various forms of consciousness in the virtual realms, Dwellers Between the Waters invites the ‘dwellers’ who inhabit in and among ‘realities’ to share their stories and experiences, which then feed back to (so-called) reality as evolving strings materializing across both physical and virtual domains to bring novel perspectives for further changes.

Dwellers Between the Waters is on view through October 8th at ACUD Galerie, Veteranenstraße 21, 10119 Berlin.

Paul McCarthy Continues to Define the Language of the Obscene in Them as Was Is @ Galerie Max Hetzler in Berlin

Bringing together past and present, then and now, Them as Was Is, Paul McCarthy’s first solo exhibition with Galerie Max Hetzler, presents two fundamental aspects of McCarthy’s practice. On the ground floor, eighteen sculptures constitute an early endeavour by the artist to combine different periods of sculpture into one, allowing visitors to draw out the similarities that weave together his most iconic sculptural projects. On the gallery’s upper floor, a series of drawings and video works from the artist’s more recent ‘A&E’ (2019–) project show film and performance to be at the heart of McCarthy’s practice.

The gallery’s second floor presents drawings created by McCarthy during improvised performances between himself and German actress Lilith Stangenberg as part of their ongoing ‘A&E’ project. The project’s title refers to the layered alter egos which McCarthy and Stangenberg assume: Adolf Hitler & Eva Braun, Adam & Eve, Arts & Entertainment, America & Europe. Created during hours-long sessions in which the collaborators enter a state of delirium, the drawings possess a radical immediacy and undeniable physicality. Alongside unconscious scrawls, magazine clippings, and imagery of Hitler and Mickey Mouse, certain drawings incorporate the artist’s tools, providing witness to the gestures embedded in them.

 
 

Them as Was Is is on view through October 21st at Galerie Max Hetzler, Potsdamer Straße 77-87, Berlin.

Lucas Meyer-Leclère "Paris/Berlin" SS24 by Joseph Kadow & Hakan Solak

photography by Joseph Kadow
styling by Hakan Solak
hair by Veronika Stork at Inclover Agency
make up by Sam Hill at Inclover Agency
modeling by Aaron, Gregor, Mahmut & Wolf
all clothing by Lucas Meyer Leclere S/S24
thank you to the adminstration of Parochialkirche, Berlin

 

Ai Weiwei Breeds High Culture With Lego to Rebirth Readymades @ neugerriemschneider in Berlin

know thyself, Ai Weiwei’s fifth solo exhibition with nerugerriemschneider, continues his extended engagement with imagery created from Lego bricks to reassess, de- and reconstruct or contextualize anew works from throughout art history and the contemporary media landscape. Using a traditionally playful, immediate, generationally and geographically ubiquitous medium to analytical, critical extents, Ai shapes a veritable survey of both the Western cultural canon and of his own artistic trajectory.

Throughout his body of work Ai has returned to Lego bricks time and again, laboriously harnessing pieces by the hundreds of thousands to interrogate the parameters of imagemaking and production, honing his use of the material and expanding its representational and theoretical capacities to shape facsimiles of well-known works of art and other popular media. Honoring Marcel Duchamp and his legacy of the readymade, Ai deploys the mass-produced objects for adaptations of preexisting motifs, translating and often modifying them within his own social and political contexts, the angular components mimicking the pixels that coalesce to become today’s digital, widely and infinitely distributed imagery.

 
 

know thyself is on view through March 30th, 2024, at neugerriemschneider, Christinenstrasse 18-19, 10119 Berlin.