March 29, 2013, 12:11 pm
When not producing a set for the Staatsballett Berlin or painting pseudo-sexualized Germans, Berlin-based artist Norbert Bisky, tries to hop on the first plane to Brazil whenever possible. In the last year alone, Bisky headed down to Sao Paulo and Rio five times. However, until his latest exhibition, “Paraisopolis” (through April 13 at Berlin’s Galerie Crone), the country remained outside of his artistic purview. The results, a return to abstraction and a toning down of sexuality in exchange for culture politics, are rather surprising. One might have expected the country to send Bisky even more fervently towards his all-baring proclivities. He spoke with Alexander Forbes about why that wasn’t the case, society’s obsession with violence, and what Europeans can learn from Brazilian culture. Continue Reading
March 27, 2013, 2:48 pm
Entering “Meanwhile,” Nathan Hylden’s third solo show with Johann Koenig (through April 13), one might think they forgot to hang up the work. All eight of the L.A. based artist’s paintings are confined to a single wall on the gallery’s right. On each successive aluminum-based painting, the shadows of a plant and stool move further and further to the right, suggesting temporal change. Due to their apparent setting in a studio it is as if they are documents of process rather than process itself. The result is a post-modern riddle of sorts: if the artwork is only a document of its own creation, and recording of process for the pure sake of having a process, does the artwork itself need to exist at all? Considering the response to this new series — bot the Whitney and the Stedelijk Museum have purchased a piece out of the show — the answer is resoundingly yes. Alexander Forbes spoke with Hylden about this self-reflexive tendency, making arbitrary paintings, and the studio as subject. Continue Reading
March 26, 2013, 6:29 pm
Munich-based publisher Lothar Shirner has donated 15 early sculptures by Joseph Beuys (1921-1986) to the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus in his hometown. The works range in date from 1948 to 1968 and were given on the 7th of March, according to the museum. In February of 2012, the Lenbachhaus was already able to acquire Beuy’s environment, „vor dem Aufbruch aus Lager I“ (1970/1980) with Schirmers’s assistance, forming, along with these 15 new works, a new focus for the museum in Beuy’s oeuvre. Continue Reading
March 26, 2013, 4:16 pm
How long does a moving yet non-narrative and soundless image remain interesting? Frustrated by the formulaic constraints experienced in their combined backgrounds in film and television — a steady shot longer than 10 seconds is considered wasted film — Henning Lohner and Van Theodor Carlson set out on a side project in 1989 after meeting on the set of Frank Zappa’s biopic “Peefeeyatko” to push the banal to a point of being interesting. Now, a little more than a year after Carlson’s death, Galerie Springer shows a somewhat retrospective look back at the duo’s work as well as new films created by Lohner since his partner’s death. Continue Reading
March 26, 2013, 2:29 pm
As a place for philosophically engaged, rigorously conceptual art, Berlin has it made. But sometimes you need to cut through the fat for a lighter, even funny, take on art making. Alexander Ochs’s current group show “Thank God I’m Pretty” is just such a digestif. Featuring two gallery staples, Andreas Amrhein and Per Adolfsen, and two newcomers, Frederik Foert and Vanessa von Heydebreck, the show is mouth-curling with wit. Continue Reading
March 19, 2013, 9:56 am
Japanese, Berlin based painter Maki Na Kamura has been named winner of the Prix Marcel Broodthaers 2012. An initiative by the Belgian artist’s wife, Mary Gilissen Broodthaers to recognize young artists, the prize was given once previously, in 2007. It serves to highlight emerging figures on the art scene that Broodthaers believes to create “Un autre regard sur le monde” (Another view of the world). Continue Reading
March 15, 2013, 6:41 pm
Our picks this week will make for a busy Friday night, but from spider-made sculptures to a bookish collage of Berlin’s past ten years of art history, they’re all can’t-miss. Continue Reading
March 13, 2013, 1:34 pm
Through September, as the clock strikes noon on Munich’s Odeonsplatz, art will appear. For Elmgreen & Dragset’s contribution to their nearly year-spanning project for the city of Munich A Space Called Public/Hoffentlich Öffentlich the internationally renowned duo have restaged a performance seen last year in Rotterdam and New York, “It’s Never Too Late To Say Sorry.” Continue Reading
March 11, 2013, 3:00 pm
Baden-Württemberg’s top art fair, Art Karlsruhe, came to a close on Sunday with a record 50,000 visitors streaming through its halls over the past week. For its tenth anniversary edition, the fair welcomed 220 galleries from 13 countries. Though certainly still a regional fair, sales topped those in recent memory, with a significant number of collectors coming in from Switzerland and France. Continue Reading
March 11, 2013, 10:26 am
For “Riss,” a three-artist show at Hengesbach Gallery curated by Stephan Köhler, Amir Fattal brings together several series of works, some of which are also currently on view at London’s Beers Lambert Contemporary Art. The exhibition as a whole, which also features Nikola Ukic and artist duo, Astali/Peirce, seeks to locate cracks in our historical narrative both on a psycho-social level and, perhaps even more so, in its material basis. Such a conceptual orientation suits Fattal’s work with utter alacrity.
In this particular case, he has taken up two architects, Erich Mendelsohn and Albert Speer as synecdochical points of reference to investigate the artistic consequences of the period just leading up to the Second World War. However, far from the moralistic aims that one might expect, lamenting brilliant, lost minds, Fattal’s voice is pleasantly more dispassionate. He leaves political histories aside for those of aesthetics. ARTINFO Germany’s Alexander Forbes caught up with Fattal while installing the show to discuss the parallel histories represented by Mendelsohn and Speer and new, anti-moralistic roads to be taken by art today. Continue Reading
