Helen Cho
Helen Cho: Together in Fateful Collision
Until 28 March
Magnus Mueller
Weydingerstr. 10/12
T +49 30 390 320 40
Cho's latest works - soft paintings, you could call them - are made out of black and white karate belts, lain side by side to create geometrical forms - Atari antagonists, fluttering birds and Soviet icons nestled one inside another. The references to Flavin and Malevich are inescapable, but unlike her macho influences, and despite the violent connotations inherent in her material, Cho's pieces have a quiet sweetness to them, and they beg to be touched.
Bojan Sarcevic
Bojan Sarcevic: The Breath Taker is the Breath Giver
Until 25 April
Carlier Gebauer
Markgrafenstraße 67
T +49 (0)30 2400 8630
Sarcevic's current installation at Carlier Gebauer is as delicately staged as his individual "filmskulpturen", shot on modified 16mm film. The artist has mounted projectors inside three-sided, transparent pavilions, set in the center of the gallery facing outward. The films project on three walls in turn, causing viewers to reorient themselves gradually in the space; hence the meditative gaze of Sarcevic's cinema is turned inside out.
Richard Estes in Picturing America
Picturing America
Until 10 May
Deutsche Guggenheim
Unter den Linden 13/15
10117 Berlin
T +49 (0)30 2020 930
Including work by Robert Bechtie, Chuck Close, Richard Estes, Ralph Goings and some dozen other painters, the exhibition chronicles the US Photorealism movement of the 1970s, with special focus on what turns out to have been the "historically significant point of connection between this American art and Germany."
Adam Pendleton
Adam Pendleton - EL T D K
Until 25 April
Haunch of Venison
Heidestrasse 46
T +49 030 39 74 39 63
Haunch of Venison hosts the European debut of the young New York conceptualist. Three bodies of work are on display, including the series of screenprinted paintings titled 'Black Dada' - the artist's abstruse marriage of Sol Lewitt and LeRoy Jones.
Harun Farocki
Harun Farocki
Until 18 April
Barbera Weiss
Zimmerstrasse 88-91
T +49 30 262 42 84
Weiss shows three very different pieces from Berlin-based Harun Farocki's compendious oeuvre, which covers nearly any possible interpretation of documentary film and video, and now spans almost 40 years. 'Gegen-Musik' (Counter-Music), 2004, positions itself modestly in the tradition of Dziga Vertov's 'The Man with a Movie Camera', relying on footage from Lille's CCTV cameras; 'Aufstellung' (In-Formation), 2005, collages graphical displays of information around the issue of migration within the former West Germany, to illustrate their failure to communicate; and the two-channel 'Zur Bauweise des Films bei Griffith' (On Construction of Griffith's Films), 2006, prises open a 1916 silent film by the titluar American director - to whom responsibility for "modern, commercial cinema's... narrowed perspective and instrumentalising gaze" is credited. The gallery will host a conversation between the artist and critics Bert Rebhandl and Diedrich Diedrichsen at 7 pm on 21 March.
Andrea Zittel
Andrea Zittel: Smockshop
Until 18 April
Sprüth Magers Berlin (upstairs gallery)
Oranienburger Straße 18
T +49 (0)30 2888 4030
Andrea Zittel, American artist and founder of A-Z Administrative Services, might be called a champion of reasonable art. The Smockshop project generates income for "artists whose work is either non-commercial, or not yet self-sustaining" - they craft unique garments from a generic pattern devised by Zittel. ("Rules make us more creative," says Zittel, whose statements, like her work, tend to claim a third space between the ideologies of the Bauhaus and Oprah Winfrey - one wonders what it must be like to work for her.) At Sprueth Magers, the soi-disant Smockers are absent, but a variety of smocks are displayed as they would be in a boutique - price tags and all - and a dressing room is provided. All prices are in dollars.
Cindy Sherman
Cindy Sherman
Until 18 April
Sprüth Magers Berlin (downstairs gallery)
Oranienburger Straße 18
T +49 (0)30 2888 4030
Cindy Sherman is doing the same project as ever, but her images still command attention, if for no other reason that the subject has changed radically. In her latest series Sherman appears as a cast of terrifying older ladies, in various graduations of upper middle to upper class. Good to see that the artists self-reflexive sarcasm has not gone on autopilot: in one of the works displayed at Sprueth Magers, she appears in a cathedral as bland church lady, eyes raised in contemptible piousness, overlooked by a wall paiting of a more glamourous manifestation of herself.
Vorspannkino
Vorspannkino
Until 19 April
Kunstwerke
Auguststr. 69
T +49 030 2434 590
Kunstwerke's Vorspannkino makes the case for an underappreciated art form: film title sequences. ("The extraordinary challenge of combining writing, image, and sound to introduce a theme without giving too much away has majorly ushered and defined the emergence and style of a whole genre.") Over fifty sequences are being screened.
Bjoern Dahlem
Bjoern Dahlem: The Island
Until 18 April
Guido Baudach
Oudenarderstr 16-20
T+49 30 2804 7727
Manic handyman Bjoern Dahlem fashions outsized models of cosmic phenomena. Solar systems, comets, quarks, nebulae and so on are bolted together out of home improvement stock and offered up, he says, in the spirit of German Romanticism.
Darren Almond
Darren Almond: sometimestill
14 March - 25 April
Max Hetzler
Zimmerstrasse 90/91
T +49 30 229 24 37
Darren Almond conceived his full moon series in the year 2000. Since then the artist has travelled to places that inspired famous landscape painters, from Turner to Friedrich. Using strictly moonlight and long exposures, Almond produces "mystical, poetic" images that are slow to reveal themselves as photographs. The series' latest installment, displayed at Max Hetzler, was shot this year in the Yellow Mountain range, a site which has moved centuries of Chinese artists.
Alix Rule writes on art and politics. She has worked for In These Times and Dissent magazine, and her writing has appeared in a variety of other publications. Alix grew up in New York and studied at the University of Chicago at then at Balliol College, Oxford. After graduating she worked briefly as an organizer of low-wage workers in London, UK. Alix is interested in interior and outer space, organizing communities, "social entrepreneurship" and above all, clothing. She has recently moved to Berlin. You can contact her at alix.rule@gmail.com.
)
)
)