Spike editors Colin Lang and Alexandra Germer went 50/50 on Berlin Gallery Weekend, traversing the city in pursuit of art and optimism. 

“It’s ‘what could have been’”, mused Sweetwater director Lucas Casso of Kayode Ojo’s I don’t want either of us to regret this, a small Sony screen mounted on glass vitrine shelves playing the film Call Me By Your Name. For the artist, scenes of the film’s protagonists/love interests Timothée Chalamet and Armie Hammer frolicking through the Italian countryside represent a life unlived. But the work, made in 2021, post-dates the scandal surrounding Hammer and his allegedly cannibalistic fantasies. So the sentiment, it could be said, swings both ways.

Still, it’s the more wistful tone that pervades the first day of Berlin Gallery Weekend. After a brief spot of hope in early spring, Germany is back in lockdown, or some new iteration of the idea, with 10pm curfews and shuttered museums. Gallery Weekend is another muted affair, with zoom tours in German and limited appointments for physical viewings.

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It’s also my first Berlin Gallery Weekend, so I stumbled from show to show with a head full of directions and well wishes – and found a kindred affected naïveté in the subjects of a series of delicately carved wood sculptures showing men in baby bonnets and bloomers. Each the size of a steering wheel, on display at Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Anna Uddenberg’s works for “Big Baby” are shaped like a child’s pacifier, but the flat circle in the centre gives way to a roundel with scenes of infantilising sex appeal, muscular thighs adorned in bows and ruffled satin. The wood projects Scandinavian calm, but the carved fabrics bulge suggestively, and the limbs are strapped in tight. It’s apparently both “artisanal and cybernetic”. Could “Big Baby” be less an indictment of masculine immaturity than the industry that begets it? Pampers’ diaper monopoly, or the baby industrial complex – no shortage of culprits here.

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More roundels, a short walk away: At KOW, Sophie Gogl’s oversized paintings of jam and honey jar lids hang from the ceiling, lifelike. I’m immediately taken by the Bonne-Maman one, but the paintings also remind us not to give into the overwhelming pressure to be bonne. The lids’ undersides reveal a different story, showing scenes of clogged sinks, moss, and a mantra for the ages spelled out in fuzz and roses: “not now”. Cottage-core it’s not, but thank God we’re spared another thing to strive for.

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Galerie Neu’s more downtempo display of sculptures by Manfred Pernice forgives us of the moment, too: the dimly-lit exhibition space seems paused mid-install, with works stacked and abutted like a storage closet. This has been Pernice’s signature mode of construction, prizing the unfinished quality of models over well-bred finished wares. Photographs, the artist’s other preferred medium (in addition to wood) on printer paper scotch-taped to the side of a circular structure that supported a pile of folding chairs. The timing is pitch perfect for our current state of ambivalence: Must we keep preparing, or are we okay as we are?

We stop by Chert Lüdde, where Agnes Scherer has painted the gallery like a theatre set for her protagonist, Princess Margaret Theresa – of Spain and of plaster and Styrofoam, her voluminous skirts hand-painted with flowers and fish. The princess is familiar to us for her central role in Velazquez’s Las Meninas, died at 21 after giving birth six times in as many years. The historical turns pastiche, as the references pile up, with the scales of Egyptian Anubis, a hammer, and angelic wings; some metaphors are simply untranslatable, we’re told.

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Energy waning, I play art-historical I spy at George Condo’s show at Sprüth Magers. He’s well known for his artful mash-ups of old masters and younger ones. Here, there were Phillip Guston powder-y pink, playful arabesques (Miro? Gorky?), and lots of eyes, while drawings fill with Picasso noses and profiles. The medley is energetic, oddly coherent, and enticing. Condo is well aware of the impossible position he occupies: the irony manages to be both respectful and irreverent.

Alexandra Germer

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Albert Oehlen’s show at two Max Hetlzer spaces was a revelation, in reverse. Much like his signature O A paintings, which put the artist’s initials front and centre, albeit flipped, his recent set of works were proof that the image world has always been at odds with the painted picture, just some don’t know it. Oehlen used a few tricks from old masters to modernist abstraction in building surfaces that resisted any simple imagistic reading. Patches of brown and dark red look like the underpainting of works before the arrival of the ocularly blended Impressionists. Save for the fact that they are on top of other overworked surfaces, like an afterthought, or a capitulation. The resulting works are not pictures, and I think it’s fair to say that they’re not trying to be, in any traditional sense, for there is a radical democracy of form – no hierarchy of figures or distinct points of attraction. The fact that these newer works are called Unverständliche Braune Bilder (Unintelligbile Brown Pictures) is surely playing up the potential political implication of using the brown soup, the name given to the so-called AFD strongholds in Germany today. Their scatology of umbers, greens, yellows, and other colouristic junk is both allusive and entirely on point. This effort reflects a tradition of refusing to make painting do the work of propaganda, for whichever side, it doesn’t matter.

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Samson Young’s precipitous models at Capitain Petzel’s Studio look like architecture undressed, raw and as potentially incomprehensible. too. Like Oehlen’s paintings, Young’s Support Structures (all 2019) are delicate enough in their meagre scales to point to the raw materialism and brutality of the built environment, showcasing the unfinishedness of 3D models, before they are preened for future development projects.

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There is maybe no one better and more hilarious than Jeanette Mundt at subjecting the image world to the logic of the painted support. At Société, her gymnasts twist into impossible motion, highlighting the temporally static character of paintings, unable to move in time (thank the lord!). On surfaces of red, white, and blue, which cite Kenneth Noland’s chevrons and targets, is a kind of parody that can only be called American. Because Mundt’s range is as technically wide as her subject matter. Four other works take leave from the stars and stripes palette, populated by dark figures, posed like those of Adam and Eve cast out of Eden, who trudge through yellows, oranges, and blacks, smeared like one of Richter’s abstract squeegee paintings. All of this serves as a very good way to hide Mundt’s technical prowess, which like Oehlen down the road, is harder to pull off than one thinks.

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To curb the post-mastery enthusiasm, the practiced naïveté of figures, faces, masks, and even animals, populated both spaces at Peres Projects, from Nicholas Grafia and Paolo Salvador respectively. This has become a kind of school of its own, it seems, which harnesses the energy and immediacy of front-facing subjects, caught in a shallow pictorial space, without much room to breathe between surfaces and their depicted depths. The beautiful galleries at Peres Projects choregraph this effect as well as anywhere. Often, the individual works function better in groups, using the exhibition space as the central picture in the otherwise disparate constellations of images. Salvador is like post-acid trip Franz Marc, where the majesty of animals floats on top of sky blues, pinks, and yellows. Grafia’s subjects are more known to us, like Elvira, who stands like a movie poster, with her arachnoid-self floating on top of a swimming pool in the background. There are no painterly tricks here (is that necessarily a bad thing?), appealing to a rather hurried and impatient eye. Distraction is a work-out.

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At Buchholz, Alvin Baltrop’s now-canonical images of the Chelsea Piers were mounted in a finely tuned hush. Many of the archival prints are so small that they require careful and considered looking. The light is that of history, plunging, obstruse, shadowing as much as it reveals: a perfect metaphor for Baltrop’s subjects moving in the dark. It’s sad and sometimes silly, the atmosphere, where jockstraps and knee-high socks abound in the playful armature of young men. How they resonate with more recently-created works is part of their symbolic effect, which today seem like an elegy for bodies and the soft lighting of one man’s camera: a strangely effective glow that just barely holds back the death and violence that would befall not just the men in the pictures, but the piers that once housed them.

Colin Lang     

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