gallery weekend Berlin 2019

26 - 28th April

Friday 18:00-21:00, Saturday & Sunday 11:00-19:00

Gallery Weekend is a recently time-honored tradition of Berlin - one of the leading art-events in Europe that serves as a platform for new-comers and old-timer artists alike. 

Beginning in 2004, the event has proved a great indicator of the state of contemporary art. In the midst of the vibrant and ever-evolving cultural scene of Berlin, 45 galleries have stepped up to the plate and prepared special exhibitions for the upcoming weekend. So as we get ready (and hope you do to) for what promises to be an exciting weekend basking in glorious spring weather, we’ve arranged a small list of galleries you might wanna check out:

Kicken Berlin x Galerie Friese    

Galerie Friese in cooperation with Kicken Berlin presents the exhibition “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness” with works by William N. Copley, Robert Frank, Saul Leiter and Saul Steinberg. With a common interest in everyday culture in America, the four artists each use different media—photography, painting, and drawing—to create a portrait of a post-war society.

The paintings of William N. Copley revolve around sexual desire and depict a world of lust, intoxication, and the moral implications thereof in the ’50s and ’60s. Bridging European Surrealism and Pop Art, Copley’s work holds a truly unique position.

Robert Frank is one of the great innovators of documentary photography in the 20th century. He wrote photographic history with his radically subjective contemplation of The Americans in unadorned, rough and poetic images. With the eponymous publication in 1958, he revolutionized the aesthetics of the photo book. 

Saul Steinberg (1914–1999), who became famous as an illustrator and designed the cover of Frank’s The Americans, et al., narrated the dreams and nightmares of an entire generation of

Americans in his virtuoso works. His unique style was influential and groundbreaking within the genre of drawing, breaking down the boundaries between illustration, cartoon and drawing; between high and low art.

The painter and photographer Saul Leiter (1923–2013) is considered a pioneer of abstract, painterly, genre-busting photography. He captured impressions of vibrant street life in New York as well as shooting intimate studio portraits, including nudes that have only become public recently. Beyond the categories of portrait and nude, these are studies of dense shapes, prototypical postures and gestures.

Meierottostrasse 1, 10719 Berlin 

 

Contemporary Fine Arts 

In separate exhibitions, the CFA brings us the works of Tal R and Eberhard Havekost.

Tal R is an Israeli born, Danish artist painter, whose aesthetic expressionism sits as a benchmark for 21st century artists. “Jew Cherry, Clown and Congo” will be his 13th exhibition.

Eberhard Havekost is an artist intensely motivated by distortions of the real. His newest exhibition, “U Say Love” provides an exciting counterbalance to the more digressive Tal R. 

Grolmanstraße 32/33, 10623

 

Dittrich & Schlechtriem 

This Mitte gallery brings us the 4th solo exhibition by Julian Charrière. The Swiss-French artist’s work bridges the realms of environmental science and cultural history. 

“Silent World” debuts a series of photographs of free divers disappearing into liquid obscurity. Naked and, in pictorial terms, dissolving, his figures physically enter another layer of the ocean imaginary. It is a meditation on the undersea realm as an oneiric atmosphere: a space that is central to our imagination precisely because of its unfamiliarity and indistinct aspects. Marshalling photography and video, the exhibition stages encounters between human outlines and their visible dissolution. The works include images of free-divers captured inside an aquatic cave in Mexico’s Cenotes, half of their bodies obscured as they penetrate what is known as a chemocline, entering an opaque layer of bottom  water—a soup of sulfurous bacteria. Through the iconographic unconscious of these images, the divers’ descent into a literal abyss conjures up a sea of metaphorical allusion. The exhibition borrows its title from an early underwater film by Jacques Cousteau, the first of its kind to bring moving images from the ocean depths to screen.

Linienstr. 23, 10178

 

Crone Berlin

The gallery in Charlottenburg will be exhibiting work by Austrian visual artist, Clemens Krauss. His new show, titled “100 Cuts”, presents us with oil paintings of the genitalia of 100 adults. The striking images are charged with an abstract kind of beauty, that will surely stay in viewers’ minds.

Fasanenstraße 29, 10719

 

König Galerie

Three artists will be on display at König: Camille Henrot, Matthias Weischer, and Jeppe Hein.

Camille Henrot, a French New Yorker, will have her film Tuesday and the sculptures Wait What and I Say on show. Shot almost entirely in slow motion, the film interweaves footage of racehorses being groomed before and after training with scenes of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu figures interlocked in combat. Jiu-Jitsu's grappling and ground fighting positions of dominance and submission form a dynamic power structure, a sporting struggle, in which the roles are reversed from one moment to the next. The tenderness of the moment of who comes out on top, is echoed in the sensuality of grooming the horses pre-race. In both instances, the anticipation of what is about to happen, or the tension of the 'almost', freeze and are suspended.

Matthias Weischer shows 16 new works in the Nave, the main exhibition space at the former St. Agnes church. His paintings show interiors that, with their wallpaper, duvet covers and furniture, give the rooms a specific living space design. Weischer paints the design surfaces of these interiors in a way that allows them to see the materiality of the paint and the canvas. The unfinished in the picture transforms the uninhabited design into inhabited spaces, the traces of paint become lifelike traces.

Jeppe Hein’s exhibition Behind Hein, focuses on the processual, the in-between, the unfinished and the open. By presenting the research department to the public, Jeppe Hein allows his visitors an exclusive glimpse behind his art. During the Weekend, old and new works as well as models and prototypes will be presented to visualize the continual open dialogue and exchange between Jeppe Hein and his studio.

Alexandrinenstraße 118, 10969 Berlin & Dessauer Straße 6–7, 10963 Berlin

 

Galerie Barbara Weiss

From the heart of Kreuzberg, Galerie Barbara Weiss brings us an exhibition on the work of Frieda Toranzo Jaeger. The Mexican artist deals iconographically with the imagery of the archetype of modern masculinity. The car theme is carried out while the form of the medium is expanded: the artist adds wickerwork and embroidery to the canvas. The pictures are continued three-dimensionally into space, making them both paintings and expansive sculptures simultaneously.

In what promises to be a multi-sensory experience, for “Deep Adaptation”, Toranzo Jaeger also worked on the internal architecture of Barbara Weiss, in order to rearrange aesthetic registers.

Kohlfurter Straße 41/43, 10999

 

Michel Majerus Estate

In an absorbing project, the gallery brings us an exhibition charting the rich artistic exchanges shared by Michel Majerus (1967–2002), Christopher Wool (b. 1955) and Andy Warhol (1928–1987). “majerus wool warhol… “cold beer” the “smudge tool” and other short stories” is led by the personal recollections of Wool, notes made by Majerus and extensive research. Artworks are brought together that exemplify the creative and mutually influential friendship between Wool and Majerus, as well as their shared admiration of Warhol.

Knaackstraße 12, 10405

 

SAVVY Contemporary

As a small bonus, let's talk a bit about SAVVY too. Even though they won't be opening any new shows during Gallery Weekend, they will be continuing their exhibition, “A Utopian Stage”. Curated by Vali Mahlouji, the exhibit is about the Festival of Arts, a radical artistic and cultural festival of performing arts in Shiraz and the ancient ruins of Persepolis, held annually every summer between 1967-1977. The Festival dreamt up visions of heterogeneous encounters between artistic discourses, rejected the idea of a unified global culture, and proposed a democratic relation sphere inclusive of international, marginalised communities. While all materials associated with the festival remain banned in Iran, revisiting the festival today is an important gesture for making visible its transgressive platform, afterlife and creative connections it created across a North-South divide.

“A Utopian Stage" reconstructs a complex space of international modernity by highlighting the ‘third worldist’ sensibilities of the immediate post-colonial period and tracing a cultural atlas through which knowledge was exchanged across alternative (often non-European) plateaus. This process takes us through a reconstruction of the gaze - subverting the single ‘reading’ of West to East into a more cyclical model, engaging in cultural negotiations from East to East, East to West, South to East, South to South – constructing a panoramic exchange of global artistic discourse.

Plantagenstraße 31, 13347

 

Hope you are all as excited for Gallery Weekend as we are. So best not forget to get off your ass next weekend and enjoy some of the exciting new art Berlin has to offer!

 

 

Image guide: 

(1) Saul Leiter (1923–2013), „Untitled (nude)“, date unknown  

gelatin silver print, printed 1970s. © Saul Leiter Foundation / Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York & Kicken Berlin

(2) Tal R, Jew Money, Clown And Congo, 2018. oil on canvas, 132 x 83 cm, TAL/M 893

(3) Julian Charrière, Untitled (The Diver), 2019. VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, Germany, courtesy DITTRICH & SCHLECHTRIEM, Berlin

(4) Clemens Krauss, 100 CUTS, 2018. oil on canvas, 100 parts, each 40 x 30 cm

(5) Camille Henrot, Tuesday, 2017. HD film with color and sound, 20:50 min

(6) Matthias Weischer, Untitled, 2019. oil on canvas, 60 x 45 cm

(7) Frieda Torazo Jaeger, Autoportrait, 2016. 165 x 165 cm

(8) Michel Majerus, Mom Block No. 31, 1998. acrylic on cotton, 200 x 180 cm

(9) Shahr-e Qesseh (City of Tales), Bijan Mofid (playwright & director) – University Hall, 1968. World Premiere. Commissioned by the 2nd Festival of Arts. Courtesy of Dariush Hajir and Bijan Mofid Foundation