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.

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

Serkan Sarier’s "They Eat Their Young" Is A Prescient Reflection Of The Current Moment

 
 

Serkan Sarier’s first solo exhibition in Germany features installations and complementary paintings made onsite during a nine-week residency hosted by the Stiftung Reinbeckhallen. It draws inspiration from The Little Mermaid, a story written in 1836 by Hans Christian Andersen after he was rejected by the man he loved, as well as the artist’s own memories of rejection, feelings of otherness, and moment of transformation. As a member of a Turkish migrant family (Gastarbeiter Familie) and a German citizen, Sarier often explores the subaltern in his work; in the case of They Eat Their Young, he does this through mythical bodies that are not only trapped and isolated, but removed (both socially and geographically) from each other and the observer. It is a hybrid of classical Greek and Roman sculptural references combined with the artist’s own cultural heritage. An exploration made relevant by the scores of younger immigrant generations currently seeking asylum in the Western world.

Shaped by the environment of both his family’s culture and everyday life in Hanau, Serkan expresses this juxtaposition in his use of color and materials. The pervasive and suffocating nature of humankind is made visceral by way of large rocks drenched in iridescent car paint, the weight of them supported by metal grates that line industrial plastic containers; a proper plinth for a rodent being studied in a lab. Great care is taken in the details of faces, gloves and feet. Yet, the genitalia remain vague, if not feminine, on otherwise masculine bodies. One figure dons a large pair of rubber gloves identical to those worn by the artist’s father years ago when he was of working age, its face composed of a deflated rubber mask is squashed and frozen in a moment of anguish. Mannequins made from a soft, rubbery material bring a haunting humanity to wholly cold forms. Each sculpture is immersed in a fresh new coat of car paint that harkens Western Germany from the 1950s through the 1970s, an era when most Turkish immigrants were employed by the automobile industry. They glitter with the promise of assimilation: an opportunity to provide for one’s family in a new Western life.

They Eat Their Young is on view through September 20 @ Stiftung Reinbeckhallen Reinbeckstr. 17, 12459 Berlin. text by Mimi Krtinić Rončević, photographs courtesy of the gallery

Melike Kara “Lunch” Salon Kennedy in Frankfurt, Germany

Salon Kennedy presents Melike Kara “Lunch” – her first solo exhibition in Frankfurt. In her work, Melike Kara first and foremost allows the being to emerge without any evaluation. She questions the notion of duality between form and formlessness, incurrence and dissolution, focusing on the correspondence between groups and singular figures. Attitude, gesture and facial expression visualize social constellation, transmitting undefined content without ever being specific. Yet, by reflecting common, everyday social encounters, the figures seem utterly familiar. Emanating from the being, the artist allows the canvas to react upon all these emotions. The color however, is deliberately selected to provide a form and frame to the painting´s inner life. Melike Kara “Lunch” will be on view until July 31, 2015 at Salon Kennedy, Cultural Avenue HQ Frankfurt am Main 

Jeff Koons The Painter

jeff_koons_ilona_the_painter_the_sculptor_SCHIRN_Liebieghaus

A double exhibition of works by artist Jeff Koons will be on view this Summer in Germany, one that focuses on his oeuvra of painting and one of his sculptures. The exhibitions will be on view at the Schirn, which will present Jeff Koons: The Painter and Liebieghaus, which will present Jeff Koons: The Sculptor, in Frankfurt runs until Sept. 23