Berlin's Must-See Exhibitions this Autumn
Exhibition view: Zsófia Keresztes, In Ethylene Arms, KÖNIG GALERIE, Berlin (13 September–11 November 2023). Courtesy the artist and KÖNIG GALERIE. Photo: Roman März.
Standout exhibitions that opened during Berlin Art Week and Gallery Weekend Berlin continue well into autumn. Our highlights include Anicka Yi's first solo show with Esther Schipper, Chiharu Shiota's red labyrinth at König Galerie, and paintings by Ian Kiaer at Barbara Wien.
Zsófia Keresztes: In Ethylene Arms
Chiharu Shiota: The Wall Behind the Windows
König Galerie, Alexandrinenstraße 118–121
13 September–11 November 2023
Places and Events
König Galerie, Alexandrinenstraße 118–121
13 September–4 November 2023
Expect: a chromatic use of space with temporal, spatial, and corporeal treatments of abstraction.
The former St Agnes church is completely reshaped by the abstract forms emerging in three new exhibitions. In The Wall Behind the Windows, Chiharu Shiota pierces the chapel space with a labyrinthine web of red threads spreading in all directions, and discarded windows collected around Berlin since the late 1990s.
Meanwhile, the group exhibition Places and Events takes flight from abstraction, featuring paintings and sculptures increasingly unbound of representational duties, gesturing towards temporal abstraction.
In two simple but outstanding paintings by Robert Janitz—The Merry Widow (2016) and L'orgue n'arrive plus à cacher sa vraie nature de trompette (2015)—the overlapping of wide, monochromatic brushstrokes in sweeping vertical movements that can be traced by the eye in parallel motions.
Zsófia Keresztes, whose work received much attention at the Hungarian Pavilion in the 2022 Venice Biennale, presents a new garden of delights in In Ethylene Arms, featuring her characteristic whimsical mosaic veneer sculptures in König's nave space.
The exhibition begins with The Guardian (2023), a large-scale glass mosaic sculpture that portrays Janus—the Roman god of beginnings and crossroads—as a two-faced apple, alluding to temptation or pleasure. Keresztes lures us to a curious garden where plant-animal lifeforms engage symmetrical erotic postures, morphing distinctions between culture and nature, and animal and vegetal forms.
Anicka Yi: A Shimmer Through The Quantum Foam
Esther Schipper, Potsdamer Strasse 81E
15 September–21 October 2023
Expect: an exercise in worldmaking where painting and artificial intelligence converse.
Anicka Yi builds a world that expands our ability to understand the entanglements between technology and ecology. With scientific rigour, Yi examines how these entanglements define human habitation of a biopolitical world.
The dimly lit gallery is populated with animated sculptures inspired by a protozoan zooplankton called radiolaria. Each of these bodily entities serve as a shimmering light that reveal facets of her algorithmically generated paintings, which Yi made in dialogue with AIs trained on her previous works, and that are suspended throughout the space.
A mysterious river of black 'magma' runs diagonally along the floor, its reflective surface activating the surrounding flickering lights. Enveloped in a fragrance developed by perfumer Barnabé Fillion, viewers are immersed in Yi's alien landscape and compelled to rethink their place in the world.
David Schnell: Flyer
Galerie EIGEN + ART, Auguststraße 26
31 August–21 October 2023
Expect: a synthesis of landscape painting and imagined urban geometry.
Building on a tradition of German painting around the so-called New Leipzig School, David Schnell mixes his expertise in landscape painting with a sensitivity to architectural forms.
With subtle use of different hues, Schnell creates striking images where multiple planes become fractured, resembling shards of glass or geometric digital glitches. In his large-scale prints, such as Abschied (2023), the glitchy afterimage of a landscape is seen from above and planes intersect in shades of blue.
Meanwhile, Schnell's smaller canvases exhibit a more familiar outlook, as though the subject is immersed in the landscape. This strikes a cognitive effect: encountering a digital glitch in daily life often means waiting for an image to load on our device. Here, the glitch invites the viewer to navigate and thus reconstruct the different planes of the urban landscape.
UNBOUND: PERFORMANCE AS RUPTURE
Julia Stoschek Foundation, Leipziger Straße 60
14 September 2023–28 July 2024
Young-jun Tak: Double Feature
Julia Stoschek Foundation
14 September–17 December 2023
Expect: a time-based media exhibition dissecting the potentials and dangers of being captured on camera.
A common thread underpinning two exhibitions at Julia Stoschek Foundation is the role of the camera in framing space—establishing a disciplining visual regime while illuminating the logic of the very spaces and regimes depicted.
The group exhibition UNBOUND tells the tumultuous story of the relationship between performance and its camera copy. It looks to the roles of the camera—weaponised on the one hand, violently capturing its subjects, and operating as a subjective and technical mediator on the other. In Pipilotti Rist's short video, (Entlastungen) Pipilottis Fehler (1988), a technical malfunction leads to the artist's movements appearing flattened, relegating her to the background, while her body is chopped up horizontally.
In the films of Young-jun Tak, the camera is used to reveal architectural and social patterns. Wish You a Lovely Sunday (2021) juxtaposes two sites in Berlin: a nightclub and a church, to reveal eerie similarities in spaces designed for specific bodily behaviours and rituals.
Meanwhile, Wohin? (2022) asks 'where to?' and features a reinterpretation of Kraftwerk's Autobahn, extending the symbolic relic from the Third Reich to its modern-day backdrop as a place of passage and site for cruising as seen mostly through the rearview mirrors of cars.
Bernd & Hilla Becher
Pamela Rosenkranz: Alien Blue
Nora Turato: NOT YOUR USUAL SELF?
Sprüth Magers, Oranienburger Straße 18
16 September–7 November 2023
Expect: a multimedia exploration of capitalist development from the mid-20th century to the contemporary moment.
Although Sprüth Magers' three exhibitions are contextually separated by historical and geographical distance, their concerns cohere in their repurposing of images, discourses, and para-visual forms.
Pamela Rosenkranz welcomes visitors with radiating, backlit blue-light 'windows' that are reminiscent of those found in Gothic architecture. Made with LED lights installed behind stretched canvas, these works initiate an exploration of the colour blue, tracing its artistic and cultural histories from the sky and sea to modern-day computer and smartphone screens.
Nora Turato's enamel panels, though resembling mass-produced graphic designs commonly seen in advertising, are painstakingly crafted through intricate printmaking, painting, and firing processes. Through subverting self-help slogans and arbitrary statements into existential questions, Turato draws attention to how commercial rhetoric, adept as it is at linking products to desire, intrudes upon personal thoughts and concerns.
The gallery's third exhibition celebrates the late German artist duo Bernd and Hilla Becher, who photographed the architecture of heavy industry in Europe and North America for over five decades from the 1960s. It is the first solo at Sprüth Magers Berlin dedicated to the Bechers, whose distinct compositional approach omits the surrounding landscape and centres structural subjects—what the artists referred to as 'anonymous sculptures'—from multiple angles.
Coal bunkers, mining headframes, and a gravel plant all feature as monuments of a bygone era. The Bechers' black-and-white photographs not only chronicle an industrial age, but today may be seen as a lamentation of the industrial eras of Europe and the U.S.
Ian Kiaer: Endnote oblique, pink
Barbara Wien, Schöneberger Ufer 65
9 September–9 November 2023
Expect: a productive back-and-forth movement on the tension between painterly formalism and expression.
Ian Kiaer's foray into various media finds unity in his recurring exploration of the 'model' as a foundational subject matter. In this painting exhibition, the layering of expressionism over formalism is evident in the artist's muted acrylic hues, frequently structured with over-painted pencil grids that recall the works of Agnes Martin.
In Endnote oblique, pink (small pink) (2023), a small, luscious canvas is covered in a pencilled grid and overpainted in translucent pale pink with stains and marks that haunt the geometric structure beneath, lighting up the room with its sophisticated simplicity.
The grids in Kiaer's paintings have a dual function: on the one hand, they suggest the composition's inner evolution, while on the other, they underscore the omnipresence of structural models that shape all manifestations of seemingly spontaneous movements. For Kiaer, the act of creation is both methodical and fluid, weaving order and contingency. The subtlety of his palette renders the differentiation between the two categories difficult to pinpoint. —[O]
