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After three years of activity, e-flux closes down their temporary project space in Berlin with a special two-day program of presentations, screenings, shows, parties, lectures, performances, drawing classes and much more; all starting this Tuesday, 25 Aug at 4pm and ending Wednesday, 26 Aug 'whenever the last person leaves the building'.

The summer group show excels itself in Berlin this July and August with an annual exhibition of site-specific art by 10 European artists, an exploration of 'cultural codes' at Sprueth Magers including Kenneth Anger, John Baldessari and Paul Thek, and an exhibition entitled 'Romantic Machines' featuring new sculptural works, some of them kinetic, by Ariel Schlesinger (below), Elmgreen & Dragset and Julius Popp.
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The winner of the May Saatchi Online Studio competition is Bob R Wilson. Saatchi Online correspondent, Alix Rule, comments: "Elegant as they are, Bob L. Wilson's fuzzy neon colour fields don't seem really serious - they might just be an effect on the eyes (after too much time at the computer?). Meanwhile eyeballs themselves appear to have entered the field, and are bouncing around on their own terms." The Saatchi Gallery will donate £500 in the artist's name to a children's hospital of the winn... read more...

The winner of the April Saatchi Online Studio competition is Ollie O'Leary. Saatchi Online correspondent, Ana Finel Honigman, comments: 'Dublin-based O'Leary's figures are brightly coloured with soft shading and a light touch, yet they convey a sharp sense of emotional grey areas and hard dramatic concerns.' The Saatchi Gallery will donate £500 in the artist's name to a children's hospital of the winner's choice. The winner of May's Saatchi Online Studio competition will be announced on Friday ... read more...

Highlights in Berlin in March and April include Bjoern Dahlem's outsized models of cosmic phenomena bolted together out of home improvement stock (below); a new series of photographs by Darren Almond shot in the Yellow Mountain range, a site which has moved centuries of Chinese artists; Andrea Zittel's Smockshop project which generates income for "artists whose work is either non-commercial, or not yet self-sustaining"; and Helen Cho's 'soft paintings' made out of black and white karate belts. ... read more...

Palestine debuts at the Venice Biennale; a senior aide to Moktada Al-Sadr becomes an art patron; President Obama's recovery package includes $50 million for the arts; Armani gives $1 million for art in New York's schools; a sculpture of Damien Hirst blowing his brains out sells at Arco for over $40,000 (below); Bill Viola wins the 2009 Eugene McDermott Award in the Arts worth $75,000; plus the latest appointments and gallery news. ... read more...

The winner of the January Saatchi Online Studio competition is Patricia J from the US. Alix Rule, Saatchi Online Berlin correspondent, comments: 'Patricia J's trim images are electrified by an alternating current. While it runs in one direction, her compositions appear as adept abstractions, nimble games in color and geometry. Flicked into the other, a window opens on the metaphysical vistas of de Chirico's Turin.' The Saatchi Gallery will donate £500 in the artist's name to a children's hosp... read more...

Among the shows not to be missed in January and February are a mini-retrospective for Bill Viola, a debut show for Ignacio Uriarte who has 'established himself as a sort of genius among finger-drummers and Xerox-machine exploiters', an array of strong work by US-based video artists including Robin Rhode and Mika Rottenberg, and a series of exhibitions in which Berlin and Paris galleries have swapped artists. ... read more...

The winner of the December Saatchi Online Studio competition is Pedro Uribe Echeverria from Paris. Saatchi Online correspondent, Ana Finel Honigman, comments: "Following the rules of old-fashion seduction, Pedro Uribe Echeverria leaves much to the imagination. Yet his velvety figures still appear like characters from classic film stills. Two women he draws could pass as Simone Signoret and Véra Clouzot from 'Les Diabolique'. With his cutting edge tools and loose lines, Uribe Echeverria evokes t... read more...

Amy Elkins' 'Wallflowers' series animates all the old questions about what a portrait reveals. Each of her works engages its subject on his own terms. Some of them, young and beautiful and tattooed, are photographed against baroque wallpaper in Brooklyn. Others are shot against real sylvan backgrounds in Elkins' native New Orleans (craggy and a bit less young, and also tattooed). Rather than appropriate the mannerism of traditional portraiture, Elkins recharges it. ... read more...

Frederic D first came to the attention of the Berlin gallery Nice and Fit (where his show is on until 20 December) through the artist's film 'Miss Baghdad', a critique of the consuming vapidity of high-gloss marketing which at the same time owes its own seduction to those very techniques (to watch a trailer for the film click here). In between making music videos Detjens was also creating photographic works, one of which was shown at PREVIEW Berlin and described by Berlin's Tagesspiegel as 'the... read more...

With work in 6 shows this autumn, plus a residency in New York, Conrad Shawcross is much in demand as an artist and inventor. Alix Rule talks to Shawcross about the way his work marries art with science, and about the influences on his work, from Buckminster Fuller to cosmological principles and conversations with astrophysicists.

Bojana Nikolic's medium is painting, her métier is exuberance, and her forte is a plastic fantastic land art. Of her own work, Nikolic writes: "A wall, the floor, a box, glass, a carpet, paper, a table, a chair, a pillow - all of these can become a painting. Does that not make all those claims that painting is dead nothing more but a neo-conservative wail?" ... read more...

Three exhibitions explore the cult of the personality from Andy Warhol to Sarah Lucas; a group show about German agnst features works by Thomas Hirschhorn and Andreas Slominski; new works by Amie Dicke at Peres Projects (below); a solo show by Nina Canell who says that she is 'searching for the art of conversation between the sidewalk and a blind man's metal stick'; and Spruth Magers opens their new Berlin outpost with a show by Thomas Scheibitz. ... read more...

Don't miss Matt Mullican's colour-coded exhibition hall at Klosterfelde; a new sound installation by Marcellvs L.; paintings by Nicola Eisenman, Cornelius Quabeck (below) and Ann-Kristin Hamm; and New Yorker Gedi Sibony's debut in Berlin.

The organizers of Art Berlin Contemporary had obviously thought hard about what could make the large-scale commercial art event less tedious. For instance: rides. On Thursday evening, John Bock's room-on-an-axel was rotating like a hamster wheel, stopping periodically for visitors to get inside and be tumbled around. People were lining up! The packed vernissage felt less like the by-invitation-only event that it was billed as, than a "high school reunion", in the words of one artist. ... read more...

Penpal, avatar, master, foil? David Hendrickx's relationship to the artist whose photographs serve as his source material is deeply unclear, the subject of his series entitled 'Appropriation'. The title is quietly wry as the project itself: Hendrickx's work reveals less how online practices have caused us to rethink our relationship to others' imagery, so much as blown it to simthereens. ... read more...

Things being what they are these days (art world, money, cult of youth, Berlin), it's not uncommon to wind up at an opening and to feel surrounded by young adults who have just recently assumed the part of 'Artist' - or Curator or Gallerist or Critic or Whatever - and are playing it, maybe a little too ardently, just hoping not to get caught out. Such was the case with the crowd circulating through Brunnenstrasse's Curators Without Borders at last month's opening of the exhibition 'The Disappea... read more...

David Levine (below) takes irony to a new level with a one-off show today which will be open but closed to the public; Richard Serra's films from the 60s go on view in July; Mai-Thu Perret offers a seasonal riff on the bikini; and the Berlin Biennial comes to an end this month with its final exhibition of works by Paulina Olowska and Zofia Stryjenska.

Aida Ruilova's newest work, 'Two Timers', shot in 16 mm black and white film, conjures a dark body of water, and in it two subjects: a young woman - apparently naked - and a rat. Constructed of a number of under-framed shots, one has the impression of humming insect-like around the pair. Each slips in and out of focus. The woman is holding the rat in front of her face. The rat - wet and glossy - in on the woman's neck, in her hair. The rat is swimming across the frame. The woman grabs the rat by... read more...

Loris Gréaud's work is more talked about than seen. His recent show 'Cellar Door', at Paris's Palais de Tokyo, represented the first time that the entire institution was given over to a single exhibition - and Gréaud is still under thirty. The Palais de Tokyo clocked 140,000 visitors to 'Cellar Door', breaking the institution's attendance record for any single previous exhibition. The exhibition, or a version of it, is now on at the ICA in London (until 22 June). Alix Rule asked the artist the... read more...

Last Wednesday Olafur Eliasson's BMW "art car" made its European debut. The BMW Art Car program has for decades involved commissioning artists to, well, paint cars. Andy Warhol famously painted his BMW in twenty minutes; Rauschenberg did one as well (decorated with monochromatic reproductions of famous paintings), and so did Jenny Holzer ("PROTECT ME FROM WHAT I WANT"). Eliasson has, perhaps typically, turned the brief of the commission on its head by not painting a car but creating a car body ... read more...

The winner of the May Your Studio competition is the Brooklyn-based Jessica Findley. Trent Morse, Saatchi Online Magazine regular correspondent, comments: 'At first I assumed this drawing was a self-portrait or perhaps a tribute to Natalie Portman. But the sitter's identity soon became clear: it is a deft rendering of Saatchi Online Magazine's Berlin correspondent Alix Rule. By scrawling 'I Choose You' next to Alix's headshot, Jessica Findley turns the tables on us critics and judges. And the cy... read more...

Alix Rule previews the forthcoming New Life Berlin Festival which opens next week. The festival is inviting all Saatchi Online artists to apply for participation in the festival or to assist in documenting selected festival projects. To learn more about New Life Berlin and to submit your own project proposal, please visit the New Life Berlin Festival. Saatchi Online TV will also be documenting the festival's live events, investigating the role of documentation as discourse and producing direct ... read more...

Italian three-person collective Amae are into cosmetics - not adornment. Their interest is either cosmic or scientific. What happens when you paint with makeup? When Amae photograph makeup explosions, they do it gorgeously with commercial hermeticism. Their make languorous videos of goo pouring down flesh. To see more of their work registered on Saatchi Online click here. ... read more...

On view this month in Berlin is a debut show for American photographer Joel Sternfeld who is exhibiting works from his series on American utopias (below); plus queasy-making paintings by Frank Nitsche, Martin Assig's coloured 'auratic house objects', psychedelic painting-collages by Israeli artist Tal R, and two new projects by Carsten Nicolai inspired by scientific forays of the past. ... read more...

Now in its fourth year, Gallery Weekend has become an institution in Berlin with galleries opening some of their most hotly anticipated shows of the year, and collectors and art lovers alike flocking to the city in their droves. Alix Rule looks ahead to what's in store this weekend, including new works by Olafur Eliasson, Carsten Nicolai, Dan Attoe (below), Aida Ruilova, Marcellvs L., Tomasz Kowalski, Maja Koerner and Bimal who at 5.30pm on 2 May will invite the 34 participating galleries to sen... read more...

Alix Rule began her tour of the Berlin Biennale, which opened last weekend, at an outdoor site in the center of Berlin along the former wall - near to everything, but paradoxically next to virtually nothing. Before the biennial, the space was - perhaps surprisingly - a sculpture park, run by a local artist group. Before the wall was erected the space was essentially an unremarkable working-class district - something like New York's Hell's Kitchen - and long before that it was presumably a marshy... read more...

Not to be missed in Berlin this April - Stu Mead's children's book erotica (below), a Wolfgang Tillmans retrospective, the Celeste Kunstpreis, and solo shows for Christian Schoenewaelder (recently featured as a Saatchi Online Critic's Choice) Nathan Coley and Aurel Schlesinger. ... read more...

The winner of the March Your Studio competition is Fifth from Chicago, US. Alix Rule, Saatchi Online Magazine's regular Berlin correspondent, comments 'If Max Beckmann had had a mouse he would definitely have clenched it and whacked out a sinister, reverberating enigma such as this.' The Saatchi Gallery will donate £500 in the artist's name to a hospital of their choice. You can start making your art works now for the April Your Studio competition. ... read more...

In his videos and series of land art explosions the multi-disciplinary French artist Cyprien Gaillard questions a romantic view of vandalism and how we justify the various traces we leave on the landscape. Gaillard discusses his work with Alix Rule, including a new commission for the Berlin Biennale which will be unveiled on 4 April.

Among the exhibitions on view this month in Berlin are solo shows by Bettina Rheims, Eberhard Havekost, Christian Jankowski, Chiharu Shiota, Rosemaire Trockel, and Algerian artist Ali Kaaf's debut solo show (below) in Europe.

The winner of the February Your Studio competition is R. Pirkenstein. Joyce Korotkin, critic, curator and artist, comments 'R. Pirkenstein's "3x schwarze Galle" is a vaguely ominous and disquieting image; almost threatening and shrouded in mystery, its dark inspiration seems to stem from the artist's psyche, successfully bypassing the digital medium's playful seductions and limitations in its rich interplay between the illusion of depth and the flatness of both line and the screen itself.' The S... read more...

Maslen and Mehra's European Brown Bears in front of the Library of the German parliament explore "ideas that revolve around the meeting point and overlapping of nature and culture." The artist pair's mirror-surfaced two-dimensional sculptures add minimal new information to the urban landscapes in which they are situated, broadcasting unseen details of the surroundings and creating views that literally interrupt themselves. ... read more...

Not to miss in Berlin this month - Tim Kube's (recently graduated from London's Chelsea College of Art) debut in Berlin, and solo shows for Marepe, Thomas Zipp, Sejla Kameric, John Pilson and Dan Perjovschi.

The embattled collective Artists Anonymous returned to their hometown Berlin this fall, following what looked like either a vacation or an exile depending on your perspective. After messy break-ups with their gallerists (New Yorkers Goff and Rosenthal ended the relationship with a lawsuit) and a successful interlude in London, AA opened their own space in Berlin near the new Haunch of Venison outpost. On the night of the new gallery strip's corporate vernissage, they held an open bar and all nig... read more...

Alix Rule's selection of shows not to miss in Berlin this month include solo shows by Ruben Ochoa, Saul Fletcher, Martin Parr and Candida Hofer, plus a double-act from Georg Baselitz and Jonathan Meese who share the same birthday (day, not year) and a show of light-themed work from the Sammlung Haubrok Collection.

For the past month, London's arts and culture columnists haven't been able to get enough of the drum set at Hauser and Wirth, on which you can record your attempts to play along to a single by the art world's darling native sons, Glasgow four-piece Franz Ferdinand. Even better, the song hasn't been released yet, and the best of the amateur attempts will be issued on a CD that precedes the album. The artist behind the project, Anri Sala, discusses his latest show, which closes 22 December. ... read more...

Matthias Weischer, Jannis Kounellis, Markus Selg, Ulrich Gebert, Helmut Stallaerts, and the first class of graduates from the new Ostkreuz photography school are all exhibiting work this month in Berlin.

The common sense that like the Paris of the 1920s, the New York of the 50s, Berlin is the creative epicenter of the moment has inevitably sent onlookers searching for its Rue Montparnasse or Bleecker Street. On a wide strip of road that runs between what once were the east and west halves of the city the search has been declared over. Brunnenstrasse is now home to around two dozen galleries and this number is doubling every year. Its former factory spaces have become studios, exhibitions are ope... read more...

Not to be missed in Berlin are new shows by Jim Harris, Gabriela Fridriksdottir, Sebastian Diaz Morales,
Jonathan Horowitz, Ernesto Neto, and Zhang Huan's enormous Buddha made out of incense ash.

You have to love German bureaucracy. In order to be counted as a "fair", a selling-event needs to last for at least five days. The result is that Berlin's Art Forum is longer than Frieze, The Armory, or Miami Basel - and much in spirit of the city, has more time than it needs to do what it needs to do. Collectors turned out for the opening on Friday 28 September - by Sunday morning children dominated. What better weekend outing for a young Berlin family than to put the kids in the stroller a... read more...

There hung suspended a reflective ring, an orange light beaming through it from the back of the opera house to cast co-centric orange circles. As the music rises it starts to turn. The ring's surface sends an expanding and contracting oval across the stage, the audience, owning the space over which it turns like an enormous monster's eyeball, a sun. So began Olafur Eliasson's career as stage designer in Berlin last week, with the world premiere of Hans Werner Henze's opera, 'Phaedra'. ... read more...

New paintings by Wilhelm Sasnal (below), Tine Benz and Tim Eitel, Michael Kosakowski's filmic reconstruction of the destruction World Trade Center and Anton Stoianov's Byzantine-esque wood panels are among the show not to miss in Berlin this month.

Berlin's galleries slow down in August. No need to feel guilty for being glad. Some of the city's most fascinating and most industrious artists are unrepresented. This month's round up highlights some of the best work by artists without galleries. As varied and international as the commercial scene, this crowd is working at least as hard. Time off isn't for wasting. It's for discovering what you haven't already clocked. ... read more...

Sergio Roger's projects have included a felt garden that can be worn as a skirt, stuffed hunting trophies, oversized cartoon-like headgear, and a backwards date - yet between them exists a strange and mature integrity. The young Berlin-based artist's work combines photographic, sculptural and performative elements. "For me, there's no real limit between them," Roger explains. It's all wrapped up in his working method - which warrants showing as well as telling. Alix Rule visited him in his Kreuz... read more...

Check out Jorinde Voigt's delicate hand-drawn diagrams, a group show exploring the shared language dividing art and decor, a selection from the Flick collection amounting to an homage to Jason Rhoades who died last year, Frank Rothe's summer camp photos, Haegue Yang's spraypaint and origami sculptures, and the former Dior designer Hedi Slimane interprets youth culture, showcasing the (predictable) likes of Dan Colen and Ryan McGinley. ... read more...

Thomas Zipp deals fast and loose with the bygones of art history - a facet of his work much hailed by critics, who understandably get off on it. But you don't need to get all the jokes to appreciate his fine substitutions (a flattened kitchen stool flies through the sky as a convincing stand-in for a constellation'; holes are cut in the appropriate spots in a skeleton's anatomy). As a painter, Zipp is evidently conscious of the mysticism of his medium. Visiting the 'World Fair' one likewise susp... read more...

Christian Jankowski is an multimedia artist who has become known for involving himself with unlikely collaborators and letting the camera roll. In 2001 he got an American televangelist to hold his live service on the topic of contemporary art - the artist lay face down on the floor throughout most of it, more as a prop than a participant - and in 2003 he collaborated with an Asian production company to produce 'The Day We Met' - a series of background videos for karaoke in which the he appears a... read more...

Not to be missed in Berlin this month is a group show of Dresden's finest young artists, including Christian Korth, a survey show of abstract painting with highlights by American Joanne Greenbaum and the Dutch artist Leo de Goede, installations by Brigit Brenner (below), Rebecca Warren's small neon lit vitrines, and outstanding new sculptures by Bettina Pousttchi. ... read more...