Riyas Komu
Riyas Komu: Related List
Until 20 December
Bodhi Art
Am Hamburger Bahnhof
Invalidenstrasse 50/51
10557 Berlin
T +49 (0) 30 3988 7200
Putting aside football hooligans as the anti-social exceptions, the rest of the world uses the sport as a means of successfully sublimating cultural conflicts between nations. All nations, that is, except the Americans, who refuse to play along with world's football fanaticism. Mumbai-based Riyas Komu uses the US's bafflement about football to score a serious point about the America's disconnect from global realities. In the Venice Biennial veteran's "The Left Leg Series," which he shows in his first solo European show along with nine other new works, Komu juxtaposes massive wood, steel and concrete sculptures of footballer's legs in mid-kick with fragments of photographs showing children playing on the streets of Baghdad, where football remains a precious distraction. His accompanying series of enormous beautifully carved wooden skulls on wheels have the initial appearance of toddlers pull-toys. But with their size he creates an ominous army of death warriors ready to be enlisted and dragged into battle by even the most immature aggressor.
Bjarne Melgaard
Bjarne Melgaard: A Kidwhore in Manhattan - A Novel
Until 20 December
Guido W Baudach
Oudenarder Strasse 16-20
D-13347 Berlin
Through a combination of drawings and cartoon-like, texture-rich oil paintings and bright monochrome oil text-paintings, mutilated photographs of boys, videos, neon poems and customized Friedrich Kiesler and Paolo Piva furniture, 41-year old Norwegian, Manhattan-based artist Bjarne Melgaard tells of the troubling erotic misadventures of a young male prostitute.
Michael Kalki, 'Das Prinzip', 2008
Plastic, wax, 283 x 65 x 165 cm
Michael Kalki: NSOW
Until 15 November
Galerie Jan Wentrup
Tempelhofer Ufer 22
10963 Berlin-Kreuzberg
T +49 (0)30 48 49 36 00
Michael Kalki is known to map out his paintings' jarring compositions on the computer by cutting and pasting overlapped, shifted and doubled images and tweaking their colours before committing the results to canvas. Now the Berlin-based artist is extending his fascination with the computer's role as an analogue for the human mind to installations. After fiddling with his mouse, he has made four paintings representing one point of the compass (named: N-Blumengarten im Winter, S-City, O-empty glasses, and W-energy saving lamp), and a sculpture of two lovers on a ladder. Computer says: "yes."
Vibeke Tandberg, 'Ass', 2008
Lightjet c-print, 179 x 127.5 cm framed, unique
Vibeke Tandberg: A piece of me
Until 19 December
Atle Gerhardsen
Holzmarktstr. 15-18
S-Bahnbogen 46
10179 Berlin
T: +49 30 695 18 341
AND AT:
Klosterfelde Gallery
Until 20 December
Zimmerstrasse 90/ 91
10117 Berlin-Mitte
T +49 (0)30 283 53 05
Despite all the money and fame, no one actually envied Britney Spears during her mercilessly documented days of deep debauchery and going off the rails. At that time, she was little more than a figure of mockery. But in two sympathetic and thoughtful sister-shows, Norwegian-born, Berlin and Oslo-based artist Vibeke Tandberg appropriates borrowed media images and poses as Spears at her most blond and bat-shit when Spears was, in the words of "Pieces of me," her come-back attempt, "Miss 'Oh My God, that Britney is shameless!'"
Iona Rozeal Brown
Iona Rozeal Brown
Until 6 December
Goff+Rosenthal
Brunnenstrasse 3
D-10119 Berlin
T +49 (0)30 4373 5083
With the exception of Eminem and the Beasties, wiggas rarely rise above being offensive clowns. Yet Maryland-based artist Iona Rozeal Brown generously finds legitimate poetry and grace in the extreme cultural appropriation of the Japan's ganguro subculture. With only the cultural artefacts of Western hip-hop as their aesthetic guides, this group of Japanese youth dramatically darken their skin, dress like urban African Americas and imitate black culture. But instead of finding the ganguro's mimicry offensive, the African-American artist reciprocates their cultural curiosity and creates beautiful, challenging and charitable paintings on panel and paper that combine the style of traditional ukiyo-e woodblock prints, images of geishas and Japanese art history with contemporary hip-hop iconography.
Adrian Ghenie, 'Flight into Egypt', 2008
Adrian Ghenie: Works on Paper
Plan B
Until 20 December
Heidestrasse 50
10557 Berlin
T +49 30 3980 4236
AND:
Adrian Ghenie: The Flight into Egypt
Until 20 December
Nolan Judin Berlin
Heidestraße 50
10557 Berlin
T+49 30 39 40 48 40
The world Adrian Ghenie paints is breathtakingly bleak, but his style is lush. His palette veers toward shadowy, rusted and nearly rotten tones. His images emanate a chilling sense of loneliness and distress. But Ghenie's expressionistic canvases are so densely clotted with paint and intense brush stokes that the effect is almost overwhelmingly tactile. The thirty-one year old Romanian painter has concurrent shows at neighbouring Berlin galleries and work in Liverpool's TATE Biennial. Plan B offers intimate insight into Ghenie' process through a presentation of collaged and overpainted composition-sketches, while Nolan Judin Berlin displays eleven of the haunting oil paintings themselves.
Vik Muniz, 'Pointing Hand (Itabira MG, Iron Mine)', Pictures of Earthwork, 2006
10 of 10, Gelatin silver print, 66.8 x 82.8 cm
Vik Muniz
Arndt & Partner
Until 17 January
Zimmerstrasse 90-91
D-10117 Berlin
T +49 (0) 30 280 8123
In three of the four series that Vik Muniz presents in his first solo show with Arndt & Partner's Berlin branch, the Brazilian artist displays large-scale photographs documenting his meticulous reproduction of monumentally significant images from recent art history in ephemeral mediums. But the most arresting and surprising series in the show depict Muniz creating monuments to prosaic and unappreciated masterpieces of design. Muniz's 2006 "Pictures of Earthworks" series consists of a wall's worth of notebook-sized sepia aerial photographs documenting massive drawings that he bulldozed into the dusty land over mineral mines. Though the idea of an earthwork was inspired by Robert Smithson's 'Spiral Jetty' instead of an abstract Zen form, Muniz manipulates the land to produce child-like sketches images of umbrellas, a frying pan, a light bulb, a pacifier, a keyhole and other everyday marvels. Though the aliens searching for crop circles might be confused, we are positive this work is worth reading into.
Katja Strunz, 'Bonjour Aurora', 2008
steel, bronze, powder-coated, enamel, 213 x 280 x 66 cm
Katja Strunz: Einbruchstellen
Until 20 December
Contemporary Fine Arts
Am Kupfergraben 10
D - 10117 Berlin
Berlin-based German artist Katja Strunz's wood, metal and plastic sculptures are heavy and commanding. But they initially appear as graceful and casual as folded paper. Strunz explores Minimalism's concerns with spatial relationships through her pointed, monochrome forms, a flight of copper stairs streaked with oxidation and Der müde Traum ('The tired dream') consisting of white wood structures through which viewers can stroll and engage.
Johan Thurfjell
Johan Thurfjell
Until 21 November
Galerie Nordenhake
Lindenstrasse 34
Johan Thurfjell's first solo show in Germany is titled "Dead Calm," invoking the ominous term that sailors use for deceptively placid weather. In the same way, the sculptures and watercolors by this Stockholm-based artist superficially appear peaceful, yet they carry an undercurrent of creepiness and danger.
Przemyslaw Matecki
Przemyslaw Matecki
Until 20 December
carlier | gebauer
Markgrafenstraße 67
D-10969 Berlin
T +49 (0)30 2400 8630
For Przemyslaw Matecki's debut show in Berlin, the Polish painter presents mixed-media paintings. In past work, Matecki painted directly on glossy magazine pages, but at carlier | gebauer he fills the spacious gallery with canvases compiled from a compelling concoction of magazine collage, found photographs, appropriated images of pop and porn stars, anonymous documents and oil paint of intense colour gradations.
ANA FINEL HONIGMAN is a critic, PhD candidate in art history at Oxford University and Senior London Correspondent for the Saatchi Gallery's online magazine. She is Style.com's Arts correspondent, Arts Editor of Alef, a Berlin correspondent for asmallworld.net and contributes regularly to such publications as Artforum.com, Art in America, TANK, Dazed & Confused, Sleek and British Vogue.
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