STANLEY BROUWN
28 Apr – 29 Jul 2023
Konrad Fischer Galerie

Even after death, the conceptual artist stanley brouwn (1935–2017) exercises studious control of his public biography and a vacuum-tight grip on depictions of his artistry (for reference, see the non-image above, provided by Konrad Fischer Galerie under the proviso that images thereof can only function as distortions). His most recognizable works, the felt-tipped geometric drawings that make up “This Way Brouwn” (1960–64), derive from his asking pedestrians at random for directions to specific nearby locales, re-delineating the partition of the map from the territory and leaving so much to be completed by the viewer’s imagination – fitting for a show that must be visited in person to see if these works are on view.

Rhea Dillon, Incomprehensible Sex Coming To Its Dreaded Fruition; nothing remains but Pecola & the Unyielding Earth, 2023, sapele mahogany and marigold seeds, 22.5 x 38 x 19 cm. Courtesy: the artist and Sweetwater, Berlin. Photo: Joanna Wilk

RHEA DILLON, “We looked for eyes creased with concern, but saw only veils”
26 Apr – 10 Jun 2023
Sweetwater

Rhea Dillon (*1996) works through sculpture, film, and poetry to surface and unwind the rules of representations and the acculturated constitution of Blackness, referring to themself in a 2022 interview for Spike as a jazz-esque player of myths. Their spare installations turn on the oppositional tension of the material archive as a site of both diasporic memory and racialized imaginaries, as well as ontological writing by the likes of W.E.B. Du Bois and Audre Lorde – the show at Sweetwater is inspired by Toni Morisson’s The Bluest Eye (1970), a novel unpacking the internalized auto-racism of a Black American girl.

Frieda Toranzo Jaeger, Open your heart because everything will change, 2023. Installation view, Galerie Barbara Weiss, Berlin, 2023. Photo: Jens Ziehe

FRIEDA TORANZO JAEGER, “Heart Core”
28 Apr – 3 Jun 2023
Galerie Barbara Weiss

The history-rich, quasi-sculptural paintings of Frieda Toranzo Jaeger (*1988) often enact two kinds of figurative and formal appropriation. One usurps the panel painting of the retablos , or Christian devotional altars that accompanied Spanish imperial expansion beginning in the 15th century, with motifs from pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, their interspersions sometimes literally stitched together with needlepoint embroidery. The other re-textures the car, long phallically iconized as a vehicle of male power, as a redoubt of feminine pleasure, their sleek shells suggestively opening to lush seclusion and futures of more hybrid freedoms.

View of Hiwa K, “Like A Good, Good, Good Boy,” KOW Berlin, 2023. Courtesy: the artist and KOW Berlin

HIWA K, “Like a Good, Good, Good Boy”
28 Apr – 1 Jul 2023
KOW

The namesake centerpiece of Hiwa K’s (*1975) exhibition is a new, three-channel video tracking a mile-long rope through the Iraqi-Kurdish city of Sulaymaniyah, connecting the artist’s childhood home and primary school to a torture prison used by Saddam Hussein during a decade-long war that culminated in a genocide of the Kurds. Accompanied by experiential testimony from the artist and his former classmates, the footage modally depicts the horizontal ethos of Kurdish society deformed by top-down power, elucidating violence inflicted by not only the Ba’athist regime, but also the militarized free-marketism brought on by the region’s would-be American “liberators.”

View of “Malcolm Morley: Sensations,” Capitain Petzel, Berlin, 2023. Courtesy: the artist and Capitain Petzel. Photo: Gunter Lepkowski

MALCOLM MORLEY, “Sensations”
28 Apr – 10 Jun 2023
Capitain Petzel

“Sensations” is Capitain Petzel’s first exhibition of the decorated British-American painter Malcolm Morley (1931–2018), a pioneer of the Superrealist movement that emerged as an aesthetic and ideological counterpoint to Pop Art. Amid the vast range of subject matters that made up a sixty-year career, his most recognizable canvasses depict the veering planes and titanic ships of the UK’s World War II-era military, often in action, always attentive to the minutest details, as he attempted, in his own words, to paint directly onto a viewer’s nervous system.

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For more information on the 55 galleries and 80 artists participating in this 19th showcase, please visit www.gallery-weekend-berlin.de.