Image - Hendrik Voerkel - - Malerei - G11 Galerie
In August each year Berlin's art world goes into hibernation as galleries put up "gone fishing" signs and close their doors. The dust settles on the last exhibition which often still graces the walls and plans are made for September when the whole game begins again. While there were a few openings last weekend, possibly to coincide with the Lange Nacht der Museen, this coming Friday and Saturday sees the true kick off of the new season with the opening of a considerable number of fresh new shows. But what to see, with so much to choose from? Well here are a few suggestions of what might be worth a gander:
DOLL | KOTT - Alexander Ochs Galleries
Eröffnung | Opening - Freitag, 3. September, 19-21 Uhr
Presenting the work of Christina Doll and Anna Kott
In Christina Doll's work, full figure sculptures take centre stage. Anna Kott creates paintings of women. The exhibition DOLL | KOTT arranges an encounter of two autonomous positions.
Born in 1972 in Cologne and 1975 in Ruda Slaska / Poland, both painters focus on human existence, the idea of men and women in their social environment, as well as their cultural, religious and sexual contexts in different ways.
Both Berlin-based artists work with restrained colours, in the sense of a consciously reduced repertoire. While the colour of Christina Doll's work is given by the porcelain and concrete used, Anna Kott restricts herself to two cold colours: grey and a strong contrasting red.
Christina Doll's work can be classified as a part of the long tradition of Berliner statuary since neo-classicism, in which full figure statues, mainly life-size and in honour of the pictured person, were installed in public places. During the romantic era, porcelain and plaster miniatures of these portraits were created for domestic usage.
Anna Kott's work can be seen here: http://www.alexanderochs-galleries.com/front_content.php?idcat=471&idart=3010
and Christina Doll's here: http://christinadoll.com/index.php/aktuelle_projekte.html
ALEXANDER OCHS GALLERIES BERLIN | BEIJING
Sophienstrasse 21
10178 Berlin
www.alexanderochs-galleries.com
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Come Live in my Head - Galerie WAGNER + PARTNER
Opening reception with the artist: Friday 3 Sep 7-10 p.m.
The works of Australian artist Natascha Stellmach are emotional investigations into the dark worlds of memory, the unconscious and the unspoken. Her installations, photographs and videos are thought-provoking and compelling.
In Guatemala, children who are scared of going to sleep are given tiny handmade dolls (worry dolls) for underneath their pillow. By passing on their fears to the doll they can then sleep peacefully. In Stellmach’s ongoing series Worry Dolls, she creates unique works that embody the secrets and nightmares of adults and take on monstrous forms. With titles like Nazi Girl, Killer or Fuckhead, these worry dolls reveal personal stories whose biographical core represents collective experiences and thus becomes universal.
In the series Blood, Stellmach uses photographs as mementos in combination with her own text, bringing forth new associations and alternative narratives.
This formal approach of juxtaposing text and image enables Stellmach to link reality with fiction. She brings into play documentary or staged, biographical or found material in order to tell powerful narratives about the transience and darkness of the human condition.
Like French artist Sophie Calle, Natascha Stellmach is a storyteller who harnesses words and images in order to analyse, fictionalise and reassess. She successfully tackles challenging topics through her sense of the poetic paired with intelligence and black humour. With Come Live in my Head Stellmach invites the visitor in a very personal way to explore the self. In the end there is indeed hope for fantastical dreams.
Natascha Stellmach was born in 1970 to German parents who immigrated to Australia. She works across photography and video and resides in Berlin and Melbourne.
Recurrent themes in her practice are tabooed aspects of identity, childhood memories, love and death. Her mode of working is to combine images and text, consciously blurring biographical facts with fictional storytelling. This approach manifests in her artist books, The Book of Back (2007) und It is Black in Here (2010).
Galerie WAGNER + PARTNER
Karl-Marx-Allee 87
10243 Berlin
www.galerie-wagner-partner.com
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PAULE HAMMER - Galerie Jette Rudolph
Opening: 3. September, 18:00 - 22:00 Uhr
Galerie Jette Rudolph starts their season in September with a solo show of the Lepzig-based artist, Paule Hammer (b. 1975), his first at this gallery. The show is entitled “World Encyclopedia No.4: Anxiety, Love, Dream“ and will introduce a staging of the entire gallery space based on the artist’s large and middle sized canvases, text-based installation works and sound sculptures.
Paule Hammer’s complex works narrate stories from the ego-perspective with its content centred on the self-image of the individual going through his inner experiences, thoughts, intentions and fantasies. The Berlin show questions the essential necessities around anxiety, love and dream. It is builds on Hammer’s stage “Weltenzyklopädie III/ World Encyclopedia III”, that formed part of the exhibition “Bilder vom Künstler/ Images from the artist” at the Frankfurter Kunstverein at the beginning of 2010, to locate various social roles & their analysis.
The recent works of the artist focus word and text by means of catchwords taken from the title of the exhibition, which are painted in big letters intertwined in a network of connected ‘islands’ joined by lines and punctuated with synapse-like (thought-) knots. The recipient is encircled by an endless questionnaire of existential descriptive patterns, made of collages. The black and white canvases, similar to charts on blackboards, describe the word “love” through the terms “community”, “violence” as well as “man” and “woman”, “animal” and the level of “being”, “family” and “body”. But only the selective view can penetrate the thick meshwork to feel the lines and isles as parts of the thresholds of the margin and dissolution of sense. The three chapters –“anxiety”, “love” and “dream”– are accompanied by a sound sculpture of a cephalopod, with the notations based on a precise translation from word into music created according to the artist’s own system. Hammer takes the recipient on a journey into his soul to audio-visualize the limits of non-objective as well as objectified corporeality; stripped in his dreams becoming himself by another self.
Galerie Jette Rudolph
Zimmerstrasse 90- 91,
D- 10117 Berlin
www.jette-rudolph.de
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Approaching the Onion - WILDE Gallery
Opening Friday 3rd September · 19:00 - 21:00
WILDE Gallery is pleased to announce Approaching the Onion, the first solo exhibition of Spanish painter Antonio Santín with the gallery.
Antonio Santín paints scenes of existential ennui, women depicted in domestic yet surreal environments cluttered with material objects. Santín, who specialized in sculpture during his studies, carves forms out of the layers upon layers of paint that he applies, arriving at densely structured yet luminescent compositions. The subjects that Santín selects for his large-scale paintings are primarily young women, who confront the viewer with a stoic gaze, almost morose in its serenity and yet silently defiant, inquisitive and unforgiving.
Santín is a draftsman of exceptional skill. Deriving inspiration from Spanish masters such as Velázquez, Goya and Greco, Santín renders his subjects with precise detail and controlled painterly flourishes. His brushstrokes take on a three dimensional treatment, reducing the paint to graduated matter that is carved away to excavate the inner being of the subject.
WILDE GALLERY
Chausseestrasse 7
D-10115 Berlin
www.wilde-gallery.com
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Hendrik Voerkel - Malerei - G11 Galerie
Opening Saturday 4th September at 19:00
Hendrik Voerkel reconstructs in thick bright colours and clear shapes an image of contemporary urban environment that at the same time looks familiar and alien.
G11 Galerie
Landsberger Allee 54, 3.Etage
www.gruppe11.net
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