James Franco at Peres Projects
For “Gay Town” James Franco has plastered the walls of Peres’ temporary project space on Karl Marx Allee (across the street from the gallery’s new permanent location) with paintings that range from naïve figurative paintings — cows seem to have been quite the preoccupation at one point — to screen prints on rugs later scribbled out or painted over, Spiderman scribbles on cardboard to text works playing with newspaper articles about the artist/actor himself. The installation is as much about spectacle as it is about the discrete art objects themselves.

Kerstin Drechsel at September
After a yearlong hiatus as a project space, September Gallery returns on Friday with a new space on Schöneberg’s Blumenthalstrasse and an adjoining design showroom as well. Berlin based figurative painter Kerstin Drechsel kicks off the new rooms with her fourth solo show called “I Love Feminism,” which digs into clichés surrounding the feminist movement as described by a survey of british teenagers: “big, fat, lesbian, and hairy.” From that starting block, Drechsel has created a wide ranging series of watercolors featuring found imagery of women across race, class, sexual preference, and culture.

Assaf Gruber at Galerie Michael Janssen
Saturday marks not only the opening of a new location on Potsdamer Strasse for the gallery but also their first exhibition with Israeli, Berlin-based artist Assaf Gruber. In the exhibition, Gruber presents a new film, “Every Corner of the Soul” (2012), which meditates on Michel Foucault’s notions of the Self and subjectivity, as well as sculptures like “First Kiss” (2013) a useless oblong bowling ball that points jokingly towards the absurd nature of the discipline itself in a use-value based society.

Douglas Gordon at Blain Southern
Just in time for the Berlinale, Turner Prize winning artist Douglas Gordon presents a new set of video works grouped under the title “Sharpening Fantasy” (2012). The work took Gordon to the northern Moroccan city of Tangier where he filmed knife sharpeners methodically grinding down blades in the Kasbah. Stay tuned for our full review.

[Douglas Gordon, "Sharpening Fantasy" (2012), Coutesy the artist and Blain Southern Berlin]

Tags: Blain Southern, Buchmann Galerie, Douglas Gordon, Galerie Neu, James Franco, Karl Holmqvist, MD72, Peres Projects, Tatso Miyajima, Toptermine