By Elisa R. Linn and Lennart Wolff
Karl Kunz, Deutschland erwache! (Germany Awake!), 1942. oil on plywood, 1.2 x 1.4 m. Courtesy Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie; 2015 donation from the artist © Wolfgang Kunz
For this weekly series, we ask a critic to select the most interesting shows currently on view in their city. Here, curatorial duo Elisa R. Linn and Lennart Wolff pick their highlights from Berlin. A new show will be posted every day this week.
The Black Years: Histories of a Collection, 1933-45
Hamburger Bahnhof
21 November, 2015 – 31 July, 2016
The Neue Nationalgalerie presents about 60 works by Rudolf Belling, Lyonel Feininger, Karl Kunz and others in a new exhibition at Hamburger Bahnhof (serving as its temporary quarters until its reopening in 2020). The show, entitled ‘The Black Years: Histories of a Collection’ is dedicated to the conflicting fates of artworks that were made between 1933 and 1945: art and its subjugation, adaptation, destruction or restlessness during that period. The aim is to create an overall picture of the time, the individual work and its tortuous paths into the collection –the focal point being its history, it evades the temptation of a ‘best of’ show of oppressed modern masters. Rudolf Belling demonstrates the inconsistencies of the period’s official judgment and taste. Whereas his pioneering abstract sculpture Dreiklang (Triad, 1924) found a place at the Hofgarten-Arkaden in Munich – where the ‘scoffed’ art work were presented – a day later his bronze sculpture of Max Schmeling was shown in the purpose-built temple of representative Nazi art across the city – the Haus der Deutschen Kunst (House of German Art), as part of the show Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung (‘The Great German Art Exhibition’). This carefully arranged show opens up a wide range of volatile questions and touches up on the complexity of origins and entanglements of artists, dealers and institutions in the Third Reich.
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Tobias Kaspar, Untitled, 2016, laser engraved reflective fabric (34 % Ek, 34 % Po, 32 % Gl), 435 × 175 × 3 cm, installation view (flash photography). Courtesy Silberkuppe, Berlin
Tobias Kaspar
Silberkuppe
5 February – 5 March, 2016
At Tobias Kaspar’s exhibition at Silberkuppe, you find yourself constant manoeuvring to find the perfect viewpoint for his new series of grey and silver shimmering wall-mounted works. They are made from a high-tech textile and realized in collaboration with a Swiss supplier for haute couture fashion houses. Depending on one’s position they unveil different patterns of abstract rectangular forms. Taken from an earlier series of work, ‘The Gentlewoman/Stripped Bare’, first shown at Midway Contemporary Art Minneapolis in 2013, the shapes reference the layout of the eponymous women-focused lifestyle magazine. Emptied of their pictorial content those forms are the structures that serve to choreograph the reader’s attention. Here again, it becomes apparent that Kaspar’s interest in the mechanism of trendsetting lies not so much in the omnipresent ‘image’ but rather in appropriating the underlying strategies of seduction.
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Clemens von Wedemeyer, ‘Cast Behind You The Bones Of Your Mother’, 2015–16, installation view, KOW, Berlin 2015. Courtesy the artist and KOW, Berlin; photograph Ladislav Zajac / KOW, Berlin
Clemens Wedemeyer: ‘Cast Behind You The Bones Of Your Mother’
KOW
19 December, 2015 – 27 February, 2016
Clemens Wedemeyer’s exhibition ‘Cast Behind You the Bones of Your Mother’ is part of KOW’s dedicated year-long programme ‘One year of Filmmakers’. When entering the gallery one’s attention is drawn to a five-channel video installation dramatically hanging way up high on the otherwise raw concrete wall of the main gorge-like space. The film, produced in 2013, consists of historic fragments including Don Chaffey’s 1963 classic Jason and the Argonauts, a fantasy romp loosely based on the ancient Greek myth. Drawing on humankind’s relationship towards iconic sculpture the collaged footage reflects on the statue as an idealistic image of man and its demonization and deconstruction in cinema. In the basement Wedemeyer translates Ovid’s tale about the recreation of human being into two 3D printed sand sculptures, made after scans of statues of Deukalion and Pyrrha – the only survivors of the great flood brought about by Zeus. By using the same method as archaeologists when recreating destroyed artefacts – most pertinently in the current civil war in Syria – Wedemeyer addresses the state of those aesthetic objects linking them to an altered understanding of historical authenticity, where the borders blur between the replica and the original.
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Sam Anderson, Pregnant Kiwi Skeleton, 2015, Kiwi skeleton replica, egg replica, wood, acrylic, 21 × 57 × 19 cm. Courtesy Tanya Leighton, Berlin
Sam Anderson: ‘Endless Love’
Tanya Leighton
26 November, 2015 – 27 February, 2016
New York-based Sam Anderson’s first solo at Tanya Leighton, ‘Endless Love’, comprises a scattering of objects, figurative sculptures, and an eponymous video work. Most of the (small) pieces sit on the floor, ostensibly marginalized; their atomized arrangement affording each an air of self-evidence. Possible connections are suggested but hardly given. Composed of various natural and artificial materials – including bird skeletons and orange peel – some of these figures rest on sheepskin and leather (skin is a recurring element in the show). In front of the video sits two simplified white tractors and nearby is a clay sculpture of the artist’s mother (a professional actor) holding a gong. Appearing again in the video she delivers a monologue comprised of various textual elements – extracts from personal conversations; an excerpt from a play. Yet the exhibition isn’t just the subjective staging of the artist’s own emotional connections. Anderson opens up a space where visitors can weave their own narratives into the objects on view.