Berlin

 VALIE EXPORT, Körperkonfiguration , 1982, silver gelatin print, 119.5 × 180 cm. © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2023. Courtesy:the artist and Charim Galerie, Vienna

VALIE EXPORT, Körperkonfiguration, 1982, silver gelatin print, 119.5 × 180 cm. © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2023. Courtesy:the artist and Charim Galerie, Vienna

Spoilt for choice by Berlin Art Week and Gallery Weekend Festival? Spike tabbed through the capital’s stacked exhibition schedule for what to see with fresh eyes in the coming days.

 Andrea Bowers, Grief Hope , 2020, neon, 124 x 304 x 10 cm. Courtesy: the artist and Capitain Petzel, Berlin

Andrea Bowers, Grief Hope, 2020, neon, 124 x 304 x 10 cm. Courtesy: the artist and Capitain Petzel, Berlin

Andrea Bowers and Mary Weatherford’s duo show at Capitain Petzel, Berlin harmonizes their requiems of eco-grief while insisting on the power of simply taking note.

 Özgür Kar, Death with clarinet , 2021, 4K video with sound, 75" Samsung TV, custom flightcase, media player, speaker, 15 min, looped; open: 122 x 176 x 125 cm; closed: 122 x 176 x 38 cm. Courtesy: the artist and Emalin, London. Photo: Stephen James

Özgür Kar, Death with clarinet, 2021, 4K video with sound, 75" Samsung TV, custom flightcase, media player, speaker, 15 min, looped; open: 122 x 176 x 125 cm; closed: 122 x 176 x 38 cm. Courtesy: the artist and Emalin, London. Photo: Stephen James

Tramming backward through time to the score from Twin Peaks, Daniel Moldoveanu indulges the melancholy phantoms of failed revolutions and the relief of finally giving in.

 Mak2, Home Sweet Home: Love Pool 6 , 2022, oil and acrylic on canvas in three parts, each: 205 x 122 cm; overall: 205 x 366 cm. All images courtesy: the artist and Peres Projects

Mak2, Home Sweet Home: Love Pool 6, 2022, oil and acrylic on canvas in three parts, each: 205 x 122 cm; overall: 205 x 366 cm. All images courtesy: the artist and Peres Projects

In triptychs of hot-and-heavy bodies at Peres Projects, Berlin, Hong-Kong-based artist Mak2 materializes the tensions of synthetic desire and our urges to gawk and look away.

 Portrait of Ulysses Jenkins, 2022. © Harry Gamboa Jr. Photo: Harry Gamboa Jr.

Portrait of Ulysses Jenkins, 2022. © Harry Gamboa Jr. Photo: Harry Gamboa Jr.

Occasioned by a retrospective at JSF Berlin, the polymathic video artist talks to Harry Gamboa Jr. about self-love and technological liberation, LA’s ethos of inclusion, and finding humor in the struggle for change.

 Margaret Raspé with camera helmet, 1971. Courtesy: the artist und Deutsche Kinemathek, Berlin. Photo: Heiner Ranke

Margaret Raspé with camera helmet, 1971. Courtesy: the artist und Deutsche Kinemathek, Berlin. Photo: Heiner Ranke

A video-first retrospective at Haus am Waldsee, Berlin, is charged with ninety-year-old Margaret Raspé’s untiring anger at the separation between art-making and domestic femininity.

 Monica Bonvicini, Stonewall 3 , 2002, galvanized steel tubes, chains, and broken safety glass, 205 x 1230 x 100 cm. All images: © Monica Bonvicini, VG-Bild Kunst, Bonn, 2022. Courtesy: the artist; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York; Galleria Raffaella Cortese, Milan; Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich; and Galerie Krinzinger, Austria. Photo: A. Burger

Monica Bonvicini, Stonewall 3, 2002, galvanized steel tubes, chains, and broken safety glass, 205 x 1230 x 100 cm. All images: © Monica Bonvicini, VG-Bild Kunst, Bonn, 2023. Courtesy: the artist; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York; Galleria Raffaella Cortese, Milan; Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich; and Galerie Krinzinger, Austria. Photo: A. Burger

Mid-way through Monica Bonvicini’s exhibition “I do You” at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, we’re resurfacing an interview with the artist from the very first issue of Spike.

 Still from LuYang, DOKU the Self , 2022, 3D animation film, 36 min. All images © LuYang. Courtesy: LuYang and Société, Berlin

Still from LuYang, DOKU the Self, 2022, 3D animation film, 36 min. All images © LuYang. Courtesy: LuYang and Société, Berlin

New video works at Palais Populaire starring LuYang’s hyperreal, reincarnating avatar spell out their street-styled vision of mortal, spiritual, and virtual realms.

 Galli, oft sieht man die Zitrone kaum (Often, One Hardly Sees the Lemon), 1989, acrylic, emulsion and chalk on nettle, 150 x 180 cm

Galli, oft sieht man die Zitrone kaum (Often, One Hardly Sees the Lemon), 1989, acrylic, emulsion and chalk on nettle, 150 x 180 cm. All images © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2022. Courtesy: Galli and Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin. Photos: def image

At Galli’s latest show with Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Martin Herbert discerns a shift in the painter’s understanding of the body, from a site of conflict to a grounds for empathy.

 Katonah Yoga "Wraps for Rapture"

Katonah Yoga "Wraps for Rapture" diagram. © Katonah Yoga Center

In her new column "User Error," Spike Editor-at-Large Adina Glickstein charts the volatility of love and the crypto market, and finds solace in nightcore and Avril Lavigne conspiracy theories.

 Agnes Denes, Wheatfield – A Confrontation: Battery Park Landfill, Downtown Manhattan – With New York Financial Center , 1982

Agnes Denes, Wheatfield – A Confrontation: Battery Park Landfill, Downtown Manhattan – With New York Financial Center, 1982

”Down To Earth“ at Gropius Bau, John Miller at Schinkel Pavillon, John Heartfield at Akademie der Künste 

 Portrait of the artist © Xavier Le Roy

Portrait of the artist

© Xavier Le Roy

One of the leading figures of 1990s conceptual dance reflects on how memory, conflict and attention have shaped his ongoing project “Retrospective”, recently presented in Berlin

 Rembrandt van Rijn’s 1631 Minerva at the Gemaldegalerie

Rembrandt van Rijn, Minerva, 1631, 60.5 x 49 cm, Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

This month, Ella Plevin drifts largely unnoticed through Baku, Paris, and Berlin.

Jon Rafman, Bitsa Park (Bitsevski Park) Moscow, Russia, 2010
Archival pigment print on alu dibond, framed
Courtesy of the artist and Future Gallery, Berlin

Emma Charles, Fragments on Machines, Production still, 2013

 

“Nervous Systems – Quantified Life and the Social Question”
Installation view, The White Room
© Laura Fiorio / Haus der Kulturen der Welt

 Photo by Amalia Ulman

Photo by Amalia Ulman

What does it mean today to have a life with kids, to have a life in art, and to live a life? Why are children and the artist's life so hard to unite? Or is this a false assumption? Spike Art Daily dedicates a series of interviews to the problematic relationship that the art industry has with its offspring. In this interview Lauren Boyle and Marco Roso, two of the four members of DIS, talk about why the concept of family is just "too much for the art world" and the differences between raising kids in Berlin and New York.

 Christopher Williams, "Model-Nr.: 1740, Rotznasen - Kinder Model Agentur, Liesegangstr. 7A, 40211 Düsseldorf, Studio Rhein Verlag, Düsseldorf, January 28, 2016", 2016 © Christopher Williams, Courtesy Capitain Petzel, Berlin & Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne

Christopher Williams, Model-Nr.: 1740, Rotznasen - Kinder Model Agentur, Liesegangstr. 7A, 40211 Düsseldorf, Studio Rhein Verlag, Düsseldorf, January 28, 2016, 2016 © Christopher Williams, Courtesy Capitain Petzel, Berlin & Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne

A walk around Berlin galleries by Alexander Scrimgeour

Every Tuesday Timo Feldhaus writes about the most important thing in the world: other people.

Stephen G. Rhodes, Unknown Dance #3 (estrangement ritual), 2012
Mixed media
Courtesy the artist, Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin

Installation view “Rum, Sodomy, and the lash” Eden Eden, Berlin 2015/16

Ed Atkins & Simon Thompson
News
24h news
Courtesy the artists, Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin and Cabinet, London

Photo: Sebastian Bolesch/HKW

Taking place at Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin "Technosphere, Now" was the inaugural event of a four-year research project into global technology and its identity. Our writer visited the one-day conference, thought about Berghain and water on Mars, and was left with some answers and a lot of questions.

 The Dadaists audience: themselves,  Berlin 1920 Opening with Hannah Höch, Otto Schmalhausen, Raoul Hausmann, John Heartfield mit Kind, Otto Burchard, Margarete und Wieland Herzfelde, Rudolf Schlichter, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (?), Unbekannt und Johannes Baader

The Dadaists audience: themselves, Berlin 1920

Opening with Hannah Höch, Otto Schmalhausen, Raoul Hausmann, John Heartfield mit Kind, Otto Burchard, Margarete und Wieland Herzfelde, Rudolf Schlichter, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (?), Unbekannt und Johannes Baader

The field of art is considered to be free, open and accessible to everyone. In reality, no outsiders have been spotted here for a long time. Does “art audience” today really only mean people who have an (economic) interest in the art world? Is anyone immune to the half-drunk advances of its warped social economy? Are we all alone? With these questions in mind, our reporter Elvia Wilk went from Berlin to Venice to the hotspots of this summer's art viewing and asked people.

A roundtable with DIS, Hito Steyerl & Susanne von Falkenhausen, and Kolja Reichert at Spike Berlin, December 2014

 Drawing by Jaakko Pallasvuo   

Drawing by Jaakko Pallasvuo 

 

In the past decade we've seen art flow and exponentially overflow through information networks. Pallasvuo's years as a practicing artist have overlapped with the peak years of sharing culture. Now he just wants to shut the fuck up.

 BMW Tate Live 2015 – "If Tate Modern was Musée de la danse?" Olivia Hemingway ©Tate Photography

BMW Tate Live 2015 – "If Tate Modern was Musée de la danse?" Olivia Hemingway ©Tate Photography

Last weekend, dancer and choreographer Boris Charmatz hypothetically transformed Tate Modern into Musée de la danse. Our editor-at-large was harbouring some reservations about this new democratic participatory art, but found it surprisingly moving.

 In the crater in Görlitzer park

In the crater in Görlitzer park

And the city that saved his life

Gallery Weekend Berlin

 Noam in front of his dads sculpture 

Noam in front of his dads sculpture 

Harm van den Dorpel on "having kids in the art world"

 Poetry reading by Keith J. Varadi, photograph by Sarah Rosengarten  

Mai Ueda, Tea Ceremony with Ready Mades, 2014, photograph by Adrianna Glaviano Artwork:
Anne Speier, Identity Entity, Broken Glass Pudding 1 and 2, 2013
Collage, 150 x 165cm each
INSTALLED: 29.04 - 15.09.2014

5 questions for Ché Zara Blomfield, who runs "The Composing Rooms" in Berlin

Channa Horwitz
COUNTING IN EIGHT, MOVING BY COLOR © 2011 Photo by Ellen Davis 

Channa Horwitz
SONAKINATOGRAPHY COMPOSITION XXII
Chinese ink and Plaka color on Graphic Mylar 56 x 71 cm
Courtesy Sammlung Oehmen, Deutschland / Courtesy Oehmen Collection, Germany
© 2001, Channa Horwitz 

Channa Horwitz
LANGUAGE SERIES
Casein on rag board
162,5 x 209 cm
Courtesy Oehmen Collection, Germany 

© 1964-2004, Channa Horwitz 

 Sam Pulitzer »Nine Scarlet Eclipses for ›Them‹«, 2013 Installationsansicht, Lars Friedrich, Berlin Courtesy der Künstler und Lars Friedrich, Berlin. Foto: Simon Vogel

Sam Pulitzer »Nine Scarlet Eclipses for ›Them‹«, 2013
Installationsansicht, Lars Friedrich, Berlin
Courtesy der Künstler und Lars Friedrich, Berlin. Foto: Simon Vogel

Enough with end of the year best/worst rankings once again. There will always be more art than we can digest, shortening our attention spans, and causing our opinions to soften, broaden, become more compromising. The critic of exuberant homages and vitriolic damnings fades into the shadows, and who appears in their place? Not an apathetic voice, but a conflicted voice. Deconstructed and self-conscious yet loud and clear, and firmly present. Six curators and critics were invited to recall an exhibition that neither seduced nor repelled them but left them with an ambiguous verdict.

 What Sort of Man Reads Playboy?, 2010-2012 Glitter, oil, collage on canvas 137,2 x 124,5 cm Photo: Moritz Frei © Chris Martin Courtesy of Chris Martin and KOW, Berlin

What Sort of Man Reads Playboy?, 2010-2012
Glitter, oil, collage on canvas
137,2 x 124,5 cm
Photo: Moritz Frei
© Chris Martin
Courtesy of Chris Martin and KOW, Berlin

It’s undeniable that Chris Martin’s paintings resemble »outsider art«. Yet I like them not for being intuitive, or spiritual, or liberated from convention – although they are all these things – but because they are affectionate.