David Levine
David Levine: Hopeful
Until 23 August
Feinkost
Bernauerstr 71-72
+49 (0) 172 184 9732
www.galeriefeinkost.com
Actors seeking work must have a portrait that attests to their uniqueness and total versatility to send out to casting agents, who in turn almost unexceptionally discard them. (The word head shot captures something about these images' bland terror.) As part of an ongoing research project David Levine has amassed a huge collection of agency cast-offs, and has pinned an overwhelming number of them - a few thousand, maybe - to the wall at Feinkost. And you thought you knew all you ever needed to about the Gaze.
Kazimir Malevich
Kazimir Malevich: Autobiography
Until 19 September
Gregor Podnar
Lindenstr 35
+49 30 259 346 51
www.gregorpodnar.com
Eighties Yugoslavia saw the anonymous resurrection of a number of figures of the pre-war avant-garde. Most notable in a series of cryptic events was a show of works by Kazimir Malevich, dated 1985, which proclaimed itself "The Last Futurist Exhibition 0.10". (The following year, Malevich sent a letter about his recent work from Belgrade to the magazine Art in America, which published it under the heading "Why? Why now (again) after so many years?" There was also a Ljubljana gallery lecture by Walter Benjamin on "Mondrian '63 - '96", and an Armory Show which included fifty or so signed works from the New York exhibition of 1913 - their dates ranging from 1905 to 2019 - none of which had ever before been seen in Belgrade.) The current show at the Berlin outpost of Ljulbjana's Galerija Gregor Podnar is by a Kazimir Malevich now twice historically and ideologically displaced. It includes many works from the artist's 1927 Berlin retrospective - but more than a recreation of that exhibit, it functions as a sort of painted scrapbook of it. As in the Belgrade Malevich show, a number of the canvases are executed in a weird, tentative pointillism, while others recreate historical documents and photographs. Even without context, the show stands up well to contemporary archival exercises, some of which are on view in the group show upstairs at Zak Branicka.
Allora and Calzadilla
Allora and Calzadilla
Until 6 September
Temporary Kunsthalle
Schlossplatz
+49 30 25 76 20 40
www.kunsthalle-berlin.com
Jennifer Allora (1974, USA) and Guillermo Calzadilla (1971, Cuba), have spent the past year in Berlin on a DAAD fellowship, and are showing two new works made during their residency. The first is a video documenting the last days of the demolition of the East German Palast der Republik, shot a year ago on the site of the exhibition. The second takes on the vast shoebox that is the new temporary kunsthalle (or the "grand exhibition hall", according to the press release) by dividing it in half horizontally and placing a dancer on the mezzanine level, above visitors' heads and ears.
Bridget Riley
Bridget Riley
Until 25 July
Max Hetzler
Zimmerstr 90-91
+49 30 21 96 1843
www.maxhetzler.com
"I proceed by trial and error - exploring and slowly establishing a particular situation. Obviously many studies will be discarded en route to a painting, though they may still be interesting as visual statements," Bridget Riley told Robert Kudielka in 1972. Whether the studies of the previous year, currently on display at Max Hetzler, were successful or merely interesting isn't specified - in any event they give us a glimpse of the generative principles at work behind Riley's canvases.
Ariel Schlesinger
Romantic Machines
Until 6 September
Georg Kolbe Museum
Sensbergeralle 25
www.georg-kolbe-museum.de
The works in this group show are diverse - and kinetic sculpture doesn't quite cover it, unless you take that pretty loosely - Elmgreen and Dragset's computer-animated skit 'Drama Queens', for example, is about sculptures that move around. A few of the works seem in dialogue with cinema, or more precisely, somehow deconstructing it (here Zilvinas Kempinas, who was responsible for the Lithuanian pavilion at Venice this year, and Robert Barta, are more and less successful). Another cluster engages with new media, like Julius Popp's dot-matrix light machine, Thomas Baumann's wall-mounted silver square, which contracts in random constellations, and less literally, Johanna Smiatek's jittery full-length mirror. The simplest piece, Ariel Schlesinger's 'L'Angoisse de la Page Blanche' - two pieces of A4 paper, which both support and compete with one another as they rotate in tandem on a plywood plinth - is a favorite.
Blinky Palermo
Abstraction and Empathy - Joseph Albers, Michael Buthe, Blinky Palermo and Thomas Schuette
15 August - 18 October
Deutsche Guggenheim
Unter den Linden 13/15
+49 30 20 20 930
http://www.deutsche-guggenheim-berlin.de
Joseph Albers, Michael Buthe, Blinky Palermo, Thomas Schuette: these four artists exemplify a representative tension first identified by turn-of-the century art historian Wilhelm Worringer, or so posits Guggenheim New York curator Carmen Gimenez. Albers and Palermo embody the impulse to abstraction associated with spiritualism and hard times, a sort of aesthetic acesticism - Buthe and Schuette are representationalists, who could afford empathy, perhaps, because they had it good. The argument will be bolstered by works on loan by Philip Guston, Paul Klee, and Piet Mondrian.
Christoph Engel
Christoph Engel / Ulrike Westphal - Ungefaehre Landschaft ("Approximate Landscape")
15 August - 4 October
c/o Berlin
Oranienburgerstrasse 35 - 36
+49 30 28 0919 25
www.co-berlin.com
The Talents prize gives emerging photographers and critics the platform of the city's premier photography institution, C/O Berlin. Christoph Engel (b. 1975), the sixteenth recipient of the award, creates imagined aerial images composed of hundreds of satellite shots from Google Earth. Ulrike Westphal (b. 1978) provides the accompanying essay.
Martin Assig
ATLANTIS I - "Hidden Histories, New Identities"
Until 13 September
Rohkunstbau XVI
Schloss Marquardt
Hauptstr 14
Potsdam
www.rohkunstbau.de
This annual exhibition for site-specific art brings together ten central European artists hailing from either sides of the former Iron Curtain, including Germans Thomas Scheibitz, Martin Assig, and Gregor Hildebrandt, Demetrius Narkevicius (Lithuania), Katarzyna Kozyra (Poland), and Sejla Kameric (Boznia-Herzegovina). They have been invited to create works on the theme of Lost Utopias on the grounds of Potsdam's Schloss Marquant, which the organizers describe as a "Prussian Arcadia" - but maybe it's better not to read too much into that.
The Office
THE OFFICE - Tiergarten
Through July
Luebeckerstr 14
www.theoffice.li
Berlin teaches that the best expectations are no expectations. Last summer, to get the art crowd through the social lull, artist-run Galerie im Regeirungsviertel opened the Forgotten Bar. The Bar also showed art, one exhibition per night; guest curators would beg, borrow or make something themselves, and occasionally it was good. This year, in a similarly generous, loosely entrepreneurial spirit, team Ellen Blumenstein, Maribel Lopez, Katharina Fichtner and Kathrin Meyer have opened The Office in Moabit, where they plan to host two events per week during the month of July. As an aim for the project, the organizers gesture in the direction of "different models of collaboration between curators writers and artists, outside the institutional context" - the first event explored the possibility of creating new economies which implicate all three by pioneering the selling of chicken croquettes at an art opening. The performance itself, by Darri Lorenzten, suggests that there may be some pleasant surprises.
Kenneth Anger, 'Lilith (Marianne Faithful)'
Source Codes
Sprueth Magers Berlin
Oranienburger Straße 18
+49 30 2 88 84 03 0
www.spruethmagers.com
Curator Johannes Fricke-Waldthausen holds that when certain 60s conceptualists raised the question of how to re-articulate cultural codes, they set a consequential agenda which persists in the art of the present; yet their work defies neat art-historical shelving-away. Included in the first group show at Sprueth Magers' Berlin space are pieces by Kenneth Anger, Richard Artschwager, John Baldessari, David Lamelas, Ed Ruscha, Paul Thek and others.
PLUS:
FAIBLES - Films as Material
Carlier Gebauer
Markgrafenstrasse 67
+49 30 2400 8630
www.carliergebauer.com
The artists of Carlier Gebauer are hosting weekly screenings in the gallery over the summer. The July program begins with Erik Schmidt's selection of Jennie Livingston's 'Paris is Burning', followed by a discussion with Berlin-based critic April Elizabeth Lamm. For full schedule see: www.carliergebauer.com
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.
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