Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff

TANYA LEIGHTON GALLERY
Kurfürstenstrasse 156
April 27–June 30

Max Pitegoff and Calla Henkel, Marlie, Berlin, Spring 2013, archival digital print, 38 x 31".

To anyone who has encountered the work of this artist duo before, Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff’s latest exhibition is an environment that is easily recognizable as their own. Born in 1988 and 1987, respectively, and based in Berlin, Americans Henkel and Pitegoff quickly gained notoriety with Times Bar, a one-year venture the pair began in the Neukölln district in 2011. Elements from the bar live on in their current exhibition, “Nudes in Tanya Leighton's Storage, New Theater Prototypes.” In “New Theater Bench Prototypes,” 2013, four monochrome tiled benches are placed about the floor, while, unobtrusively, a half-empty—or rather, in the spirit of the pair’s practice, half-full—cocktail glass is “left behind” nearby in New Media (blue cocktail), 2012.

The main component of the exhibition is a photographic series of eight seductive images depicting artists—Marlie Mul and Yngve Holen, among others, all friends of Henkel and Pitegoff—doing their taxes. If these artists are recognizable at all, however, it’s only through the works’ titles, for instance Marlie, Berlin, Spring 2013 and Yngve, Berlin, Spring 2013, as each are represented only by the edge of their shoulder or the tip of their elbow leaning over a table. The focal points of the images are the tables themselves, which are littered with receipts, ticket stubs for airplanes and trains to places like Basel, empty coffee cups, and pastry crumbs. Warm lighting lends a serene ambience to an otherwise frustrating and quite literally taxing activity. Through these images, Henkel and Pitegoff home in on the precarity of a project-based lifestyle and the evolving ennui of everyday logistics that comes with being an artist in a rapidly gentrifying city. The series is a generous gesture from artists whose concern with community, specifically that of the arts, and its implication within systems of economics and labor seems to be at the core of their practice.

— Johanne Nordby Wernø

Maria Lassnig

CAPITAIN PETZEL
Karl-Marx-Allee 45
April 26–June 18

Maria Lassnig, Mann, Frau und Hund (Man, Woman, and Dog), 2010, oil on canvas, 59 x 82 1/2."

The scenes in Maria Lassnig’s paintings depict physical discomfort and friction but are rendered in a palette of bright hues that cause each to seem strikingly jocund. This ambiguity makes these works intriguing—attractive and unpleasant at the same time. Eight paintings, five of them from the past three years, are now on display in Lassnig’s debut at Capitain Petzel. Most of them take up the body, a motif that has preoccupied the artist since the beginning of her career.

Mann, Frau und Hund (Man, Woman, and Dog), 2011, shows a man and woman; their naked bodies almost touch and it seems they are on the verge of kissing. Lassnig makes the bodies glow through a tonal build up of color from dark brown over purple to white. Through the explicit contours, the individuals each seem surrounded by an almost Munch-like atmosphere of isolation in space. A line divides the painting in two parts and opposite the couple is a big dog with sad eyes—he lays on the ground, illuminated in a golden haze. His dominant presence underlines the melancholy within the scene, putting the couple in a second, imaginary plane of the painting.

Lassnig paints her scenes in quick and expressive gestures, juxtaposing her delicate, precise use of color. In Raketenbasis – Missiles 1 and 2, 1989, a field of missiles, grenades, and tanks is grouped in more or less horizontal lines. This is the only older work in the show and is reminiscent of neo-expressionism and the better years of Markus Lüpertz. Color plays a distinctive role in counterbalancing the mood created by the military motif. In small details and single lines a whole palette is at hand, creating an immersive sense of polyphony.

— Jurriaan Benschop

Alex Israel

PERES PROJECTS BERLIN
Karl-Marx-Allee 82
April 26–June 15

View of “Alex Israel: Self-Portraits,” 2013.

Alex Israel believes in stardust, a magic unique to Hollywood that has the power to turn the ordinary into celebrity. Whereas in his previous output he has acted as director, sprinkling everything from rented prop-warehouse set pieces to reality-television stars throughout his installations and videos, in this exhibition he has turned the wand on himself. “Alex Israel: Self-Portraits” features twenty identical fiberglass and bondo profiles of his head, all stamped assembly line style across the walls of the gallery. Each has been sprayed in gradient palettes lifted from a variety of references as well as paintings by other artists, many of whom have been as bedazzled by Southern California as Israel is himself.

The profile—the artist calls it his “logo”—was originally created for As It Lays, 2012, a beguiling if campy work of talk show–style interviews for which Israel cast himself as host. By also casting himself as an icon, Israel here positions himself within a lineage of artists that mine the cult of celebrity and the rhetoric of advertising. In building his face out of plastic, spraying it with colors evocative of LA, and simplifying its contours into shapes that can be easily reproduced, Israel collapses narratives that constitute the dreams of those who flock to the City of Angels into a single, compact image. The icon is a brand—which today is perhaps the most veracious form of portraiture.

Hollywood has always been Israel’s muse. For him, it is not a place or a community but a way of being in the world. If Hollywood as a way of life is his subject, then Israel is mining not the cult of the celebrity but of the reality celebrity. After all, Tinseltown no longer belongs to Hitchcock (a director who also turned his face into an icon) but to those who dream of transforming their lives into marketable brands. What’s perhaps most magical about Israel is the way he immerses himself in this realm, celebrating dreams that are so easy to dismiss. This places him among the most audacious artists working today.

— Allese Thomson

Özlem Altin

CIRCUS
Obentrautstrasse 21, Haus 17
April 27–June 15

View of “Cathartic Ballet,” 2013.

Continuing her ongoing exploration of how bodies take on signification and of how images move, Özlem Altin’s solo show functions as a choreography of objects and images that perform the role of subjects and yet reverberate a sense of loss of the very subjecthood they seem to animate. The exhibition’s entry point is Untitled (Mädchen im Baum), 2013, two almost identical black-and-white photo prints, depicting a human figure suspended from the branch of a tree (photographs the artist took with her mobile phone, that were digitally altered and then printed on photopaper). From one image to the next, there is both a change in perspective and in the figure’s posture; this discrepancy defines the kind of Warburgian movement between image and gesture, and between animation and inertia, that is the conceptual fulcrum of the show.

In the main space of the gallery, four portraits centrifugally spread on the walls surround a group of three sculptures in which the integrity of the human figure dissolves into grey, brown, and blue paper surfaces. Consider Untitled, 2013, a photo print of a woman that is covered with layers of ink and oil and delicately collaged paper fragments that conceal most of the figure’s torso and face. Echoing this portrait’s color gamut and materiality, Weak distance, 2012—placed in close vicinity to Untitled—consists of two saggy cardboard panels, leaning against the wall. Coated with frail, ink-treated layers of paper the piece appears as a spatialized abstraction of the portrait, staging the collapse of the image and body as well as of the subject.

While works like Untitled and Staring Back at Him, 2012, call to mind a 1920s collage aesthetic (for example Hannah Höch), the floor pieces are evocative of post-Minimalist sculpture and its return to the tactile register of the bodily and handmade. Bringing these two moments into a loose constellation, Altin’s show invites us to think about the links between the fetishistic desire for the animation of the inorganic, postwar debates on sculpture’s subjecthood (catalyzed by critics such as Michael Fried) and today’s renewed interest in the (alleged) agency of objects.

— Jenny Nachtigall